B School, this is my next 5 years plan.

The next 5 years, I determine to modify and strengthen innovation skills in South East Asia, in particular, the Malaysian industry through promoting fundamental aptitudes mirrors German’s power of linguistic, details-oriented and perfectionism. The question is how to embed them deeply into the local culture.

Concurrently, I will promote organizational structure that aligned with the organization’s missions, goals and objectives, and fulfilling quality product and service. When the atmosphere here is closely aligned with the critical element of innovation, transforming can produce more easily and with greater enthusiasm; the industry is now ready to be transformed from incremental process improvement to innovation.

My goals can be accomplished through employment, partnership, affiliation, consultancy, and corporate venturing. The business model will take the form of a solution shop, my job as consulting is to diagnose problems, recommend solutions and facilitate the innovation process.

“Disruptive innovation does not take root though a direct attack on the existing system. Instead, it must go around and underneath the system. This is how disruptive drives affordability, accessibility, capability, and responsiveness.” – Disrupting Class.

This phrase carries certain weight on my determination to transforming a local industry using a disruptive innovation which creates a new market and value network disrupting an existing market and value network. I intend to explore more about disruptive innovation and applied in SEA countries later.

To generate innovation ideas, one must have the behavioural skills of questioning, observing, networking, and experimenting and then the cognitive skill of associating. Most of the Malaysians are lack of these skills; they are not keened on spending time on associational thinking and discovery activities other than personal grievances. What’s underneath the Malaysian management system or industry? What’s preventing a Malaysia industry from innovate?

Malaysian society is hierarchy-oriented. But it is not quite like that of Japanese. Although most of the Asian cultures look quite similar, Malaysian society does not possess the quality of creativity as that of Japanese, Chinese or Korean. Most of the Malaysians speak several languages, but they are in most cases no proficient in any of the languages. Young Malaysian is highly unlikely to challenge the status quo and turn out innovation, they may have the passion of exploration and discovery, but that would be just within their linguistic power and verbal capability.

They are careless observers, not sensitive to details, and not skillful enough on detecting trends, variation, or patterns around them. They react to action that has a significant magnitude. If I were to illustrate this in statistic, the sensitivity is blind-folded by the local chronic noises. They cannot see significant changes unless the chronic noise has been removed from their environment.

During my recent employment in a typical Malaysian company, I explore its organization structure and behavioral – the behavior of a group of local managers; in particular, the head of the department, and the decision makers, which mirrors the architecture of the products and services. Many managers are deficient in those critical skills that essential to develop organizational structures that enable new solutions to be formulated and implemented successfully. I saw entrepreneurial opportunity within this area is tailoring the structures that influence manager’s behavior.

Many facts collected from this group through they response to issues and how they resolve violation to fundamental industry standard. This also included their problem solving and decision making skill, continuous improvement, how frequent they engaged themselves in brainstorming activities together with the cross functional team, and how they handled ethical issue. There are many areas I can investigate to get a full grasp of the organization behavioural from this community comparing that of a multinational company.

Based on direct participant observation case analysis, I explored factors which influence performance of individuals in complex organizations. It is necessary for managers to develop meaningful solutions to today’s complex management problems by using innovative technological solutions.

I saw an opportunity of leveraging the local industry through innovation in behavioural architecture. Then, its modifications of practice of quality and process improvement and enhancement with that incremental change of less formal on-the-job modifications of practice can be modified to innovation – a substantial, positive change in the amount of already available market structure through exchange and combination of local and international professional experiences.

I cite SMI because it has the potential to grow and it has plenty of resources at its disposal, but it needs to take a new direction. I believe a SMI can find a new path with a fresh, new team of members, some of whom are recruiting from the high tech industries like Robert Bosch, Motorola, Dell, or Flextronics.

The company is tremendously diverse. We’re all in different industrial brackets that provide the organization a broader range of professional and industrial experiences. However, it still lacks an essential skill of a manager to change the organization’s structure in ways that fit the problems,or to morph innovative idea into a concept that fits the business models of the organization..

Very often, I observed a problem and knew there are some proven solutions for it. However, within the constraints of the “traditional” organization structure and culture, I cannot implement those solutions. Implementing new ideas often are constrained by strict rules, inexperienced management, reluctant to change and conventional thinking. Members cannot establish an extensive solution to the problem like the multinational funded company.

A solution that transforms many multinational organizations proves impossible to implement in this organization, not because of financial or technical constraint. It is due to employees in those multinational organizations are eager to improve, break the status quo, or willing to accept the challenge, whereas those in this organization are passively embracing normality.

I saw potential to resolve the biggest challenge facing a Malaysian industry right now – an organization behavioral in the near future. The coming years would be building a collaborative channel and discussion platform with analysis of cross- function issue once the local organizations are matured to handle knowledge and the environment is adequate to fuel innovation. The new platform is a multi-disciplined, fully integrated, real time and thinking software network system. This inspiration comes from engineering integrated system used in high tech industry specially designed to enhance system, product, service and quality.

“You cannot manage knowledge – nobody can. What you can do is to manage the environment in which knowledge can be created, discovered, captured, shared, distilled, validated, transferred, adopted, adapted and applied. – Chris Collision and Geoff Parcell.

I do not know these authors, I am yet to read their book. They are anonymous in the technological world in which I “come to blow” in search of opportunity to disrupt by innovation. Still, I cannot deny the truth behind the quotation; their quote stimulates reverberation deep inside me as I started my journey of learning to fly high in the international sky. From dive deep in details to fly high seeing a large picture, I attain awareness by switching the perception of fully preserving a dying, inflexible value to cross-border understanding the external environment that could fuel an innovation in a Malaysian industry.

Wai Ping Lee/Nov 2011