Previously, it was complicated and siloed to access information on public funding programs and projects related to R&D, commercialisation and innovation from 14 different ministries and more than 20 different sectoral agencies websites. We went from brick and mortar, decentralized centres of information in the countryside, to a centralised birds eye view dashboard. The dashboard aims to monitor the performance of the government funded projects and programs, and reports their outcomes and impact to the country based on national priority areas.

To date, 1DANA has facilitated R&D, commercialisation and innovation public funding by reducing funding duplication disbursements and fragmentation of public innovation funding by streamlining efforts. It also ensures projects and programmes related to R&D, commercialisation and innovation are guided and aligned to \Malaysia’s growth priority areas and sectorial focus; Apart from the above, the business process innovation instills Ministerial and Agencies collaborative efforts and initiatives for wealth creation from R&D, commercialisation and innovation activities and strengthening the National Innovation Agency Malaysia quadruple helix initiatives.

1DANA has partnered with 14 different federal Ministries of Malaysia including more than 20 Agencies under the said Ministries. Thru the monitoring and evaluation mechanism, year on year we have seen projects and programs are align to national priority areas and there are more inter Ministries and Agencies collaborations on R&D, commercialisation and innovation projects and programs initiative.

Our stakeholders are mainly the projects and programs owners, the decision makers, who are the senior government officials. On monitoring and evaluation, project owners will report the performance of each projects and programs funded by public funding via 1DANA on a quarterly basis online. The performance in Output Key Performance Indexes is translated into a meaning full dashboard indicators which then the senior government officials can use for decision makings and strategic planning.

To date more than 457 projects and programs are being monitored for their research output performance, which hopes to create better R&D, commercialisation and innovation outputs and impacts for Malaysia. The KPIs output are in the forms of
1) # of publications, citations IPR filed, Awarded, Researchers, Job Creations, Entrepreneur ;
2) The wealth creation output which are sales, investment ROI ;
3) Conversion Rate in the stages of research and development ;
4) Commercialisation Rates of the public funded projects and programs.

There are many challenges, even though we dealt with internal government matters.
Major challenges include:
1) To define the strategy of the monitoring and evaluation mechanism itself;
2) To get buy-ins from senior government officials of the Ministries and Agencies as the involves governance and transparencies and can dilute the Ministries mandates;
3) To get support resources representatives as not Ministries are willing to support and share;
4) To overcome silos mentality and to educate the vision and mission of the mechanism;
5) Collecting historic and current R&D, commercialisation and innovation data from Ministries and Agencies as some are not very accurate, some are very raw and some may not have them as part of a repository.

First and foremost, you must understand your country's innovation landscape then you would know how to tackle and strategize a road map. Policies, regulations, Institutions, infrastructures, investments, incentives, talents, capacity building, great minds, visionary leadership must all be in place to ensure success in streamlining the landscape and ecosystems.

I believe a lot of countries have the same issues such as Malaysia and with the proven solutions that was build and tested for the period of 5 years, I believe other countries can also learn from this projects as part of building capacities and improving their R&D, commercialisation and innovation ecosystems.

The task was challenging as it has to go thru layers of bureaucracies within the government hierarchies. The best way to win is to be diplomatic about everything you do and negotiate for the sake of the country. You must have the charm to face senior officials and of course solid experience in the skills and arts of negotiations and diplomacy.