Promotion of Malaysian technology companies is poor (to international markets)

I would venture that even promotion of tech companies to local markets is poor.

Feedback and concrete suggestions would be super helpful here. What do you want to see happen? 

Assuming of course startups have built a product which solves a real problem, and assuming of course that market validation (through accelerators or other programmes) has been established, this would be the critical chasm most startups need to cross. the point at which commercialization happens, (as opposed to user acquisition). it's in getting these reference customers, the tipping point, which many flounder at.

there're many existing initiatives for this, the most prolific being MDeC's market development programmes. the challenge here is that many startups are not MSC Malaysia companies, thus don't get included in such programmes. nevertheless, when at MDeC, i'd initiated a programme which addressed the commercialization challenge two fold, both local reference customers and regional reference customers.

what we'd done (and to my knowledge still being done at MDeC), is to first find the opportunity. this was done by partnering with larger corporations and customers, and getting them involved in the solutions building. by having problem owners from these customer organizations in the same room as startups (MSC companies then), and throwing out their real world challenges, we invited solutions from these startups to solve these challenges. solutions the customer would adopt and fund. during that period (held over 5-6 days), startups would iterate their solutions towards what was needed by the customers, guided by the customers themselves. one way of looking at this is a form of market validation, or co-creation of the solution in collaboration with the customer thus leading to a much, much higher probability of acceptance of the solution by a paying customer.

in addition, traditionally, startups aren't considered by large customers due to their size and perceived stability. this was mitigated by stacking complementary solutions together, under the aegis of a larger solutions provider who'd be able to navigate the procurement and deployment stage, and the same time provide an umbrella to startups.

startups would thus gain a reference customer, and tremendous experience in real world deployment commercially.

we'd called this then our stacking approach, though programmatically it was known as co-creation: http://www.digitalnewsasia.com/digital-economy/mdec-employs-stacking-approach-to-create-greater-value

wash. rinse. repeat.

This is great, Dinesh. Point taken and really great feedback. 

Curious - what are the success stories that have come out of this matching program? Are they listed anywhere? Who owns or tracks the results of these projects? Thanks!

That would be a question for MDeC. I left 45 days after that DNA article was published. the large customers we'd worked with then were mentioned in the article: MARA, Faber Group, Celcom, AirAsia among others.

Alas, one thousand small victories doesn't add up to one decisive defeats. Where is the turning point? Where is the critical mass and junction? Can't see any.

Plus, not every startup doesn't build a solution to solve a problem. This is a misleading thinking. A startup have a vision and reality, the difference between reality and vision is a problem. There is no ONE definitive answer for the problem. We have to test it out every round to see how it goes.

What really headache is SMEs style thinking. Startup might be SMEs, but not all SMEs are startups. Starting with an unknown unknown must not be confused with a known unknown.