In effort to drive innovation and entrepreneurship among the brightest of minds in our country, MOSTI together with its agencies has been active with various startup programs including the MyHackathon Penang 2020. The event recently saw 6 teams winning the competition with their out of the box digital solution ideas especially for the public services sector.
Themed Inovasi Asas Pembangunan, the winning solutions looked into several problems including a single platform for start-ups to get advisory, startup monitoring, tracking and reporting; digital solution for continuous engagements with the public, promote of STI (Science, Technology and Innovation) using interactive learning; with a gamified platform to increase the awareness and interest of science and aerospace for students. Puan Rafiza Ghazali, Group Chief Executive Officer of Cradle Fund made the winner announcement, with teams selected under the SPRINT and MARATHON category.
The winners from the MARATHON category would each receive a conditional grant of RM250,000 for Pilot Deployment for the next 12 months, working together with related ministries and agencies. Those from the SPRINT category, the first, second, and third winners willeach receive cash prizes of RM10,000, RM7,500 and RM5,000 respectively and other non-monetary exciting prizes. According to Puan Rafiza, there is an urgent need for STI in the wake of Covid-19 and events like MYHackathon 2020 Penang is looking for solutions that can reach different segments of the society to drive the need for more innovation in tackling the systemic gaps the pandemic is unveiling.
She highlighted that for the Penang round, Cradle is looking for digital solutions and platforms to consolidate, invigorate and promote Science, Technology and Innovation at a national level – from students, start-ups, scientific community, policy makers, to the general public. MYHackathon 2020, an initiative under the National Economic Recovery Plan (PENJANA) has six rounds and are driven by specific themes and matching sets of problem statements respectively to ensure the widest variety and number of problem statements for maximum value.
It is a programme under MOSTI, with Cradle Fund as the main secretariat and supported by Malaysian Global Innovation & Creativity Centre (MaGIC), Malaysian Administrative Modernisation & Management Planning Unit (MAMPU), UniMAKER, and Telekom Malaysia.
