It was another eye-opening day for Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak in Silicon Valley with a meeting with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and a visit to Google.

September 27, 2013 Leave a comment

Updated: Thursday September 26, 2013 MYT 8:25:13 AM

Innovation the keyword in trip to Silicon Valley

MERGAWATI ZULFAKAR IN SILICON VALLEY, USA

IT was another eye-opening day for Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak in Silicon Valley with a meeting with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and a visit to Google. Najib, who is on a three-day working visit to Silicon Valley, was at Facebook’s head office in Menlo Park besides making a trip to Google’s headquarters in Mountain View. “The experience is very, very interesting, an eye-opener on not only products but also the lifestyle, especially the culture of innovation.“How do we promote the culture of innovation? It’s not about the hardware, it’s not about the regulations and incentives but about the way of life and the culture of innovation which is important because that’s the underpinning for innovation to really succeed,” he told the Malaysian media.

Najib said that during his visit to Facebook, they had expressed willingness to work with the Malaysian Government on its efforts to further engage the people to learn about what people wanted.

The offer by Facebook would also enable the Government to inform the people on its latest policies.

Malaysia has among the biggest number of FB users in the world, ranking at No. 18 with almost 13 million users.

Najib’s three-hour visit to Google saw the Prime Minister trying out the latest innovative products, including Google glass and Google driverless car.

Google glass is a wearable computer with an optical head mounted display that can communicate with the Internet via natural language voice commands.

The two visits on Tuesday were part of a series of high-level discussions and demonstrations for the Prime Minister’s “experiential visit” to Silicon Valley organised by the Multimedia Development Cor­poration (MDeC).

MDeC is the driver of Malaysia’s Digital Economy Initiative, Digital Malaysia and the National ICT Initiative, MSC Malaysia.

The Prime Minister will also be attending the United Nations general assembly in New York.

At another press conference after opening the Bio-International Advisory Panel Meeting 2013 here, Najib said bioeconomy had become a game-changer for Malaysia to become a high income nation.

“To date, Biotech Corp has managed to secure approved investments of US$4.5bil (RM13.8bil), which is 53% above the Phase 2 target of US$3bil (RM9bil),” Bernama was quoted as saying.

Najib said the biotechnology industry had induced more than 80,000 direct and indirect employment opportunities.

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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