Indonesia Needs to Invest in Research

October 27, 2013 Leave a comment

Indonesia Needs to Invest in Research

By Jakarta Globe on 12:48 pm October 25, 2013.
As Indonesia’s economy matures and moves higher up the value chain, it will no longer be able to rely on its rich natural resources and robust domestic consumption. If the country wants to realize its ambition of being a top 10 global economy by 2050, it will have to innovate and create its own technology. For this to happen, the country needs researchers and scientists who can carry out cutting-edge research in medicine, pharmaceuticals, consumer products and social trends. We need only look at Japan and South Korea to see how far they have advanced due to investments in research.Closer to home, Singapore and Malaysia spend a considerable chunk of their budget on research. Singapore, for example, has developed world-class biotechnology research labs and attracts global talent to work in the labs.

Where does Indonesia stand on research and innovation? Sadly the country only spends 0.08 percent of its GDP on research, amounting to approximately Rp 15 trillion ($1.35 billion) a year. It is a crime that researchers with Ph.D.’s are paid Rp 3 million a month. How will we attract the best brains if we do not value their talent?

Indonesia will need some 200,000 additional researchers across the sciences in order to catch up with the rate of technological advance in countries with strong research programs, the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI) said on Wednesday.

“At present, the number of researchers in Indonesia is insignificant,” Lukman Hakim, the head of the Institute, told Antara news agency.

This means the government and the private sector must do more to promote the sciences and invest in new research facilities. Currently there are only a handful of such facilities in the country and if this situation is not rectified, in the longer term it will affect economic growth and social progress.

Filed under Innovation

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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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