XMUM held the first session of Innovation Talk Series, an event organized by the Office of Research and Innovation, on 27 November 2018. The series aims to invite local and international experts to give public talks that will:

1. Encourage and inspire XMUM students to be innovative and entrepreneurial;

2. Impart in-depth knowledge to help XMUM students compete in the international environment full of challenges; and

3. Bring in external perspectives to challenge XMUM students to think outside the box.

The first talk was given by Mr. Arif Abdul Rahman, a consultant from the United Nation Development Programme, who worked with youth to address some of the world’s pressing issues. During the talk, Mr. Arif introduced the concept of “social entrepreneurship” and “design thinking”, and shared cases of how enterprises solved social problems while sustaining themselves as a business.

The talk was started with some attractive photos of the latest technologies and, in contrast, some social issues faced by Malaysia and the world.

Mr. Arif showed the picture of successful social entrepreneurship that helped to reduce child mortality.

“We have the incredible technological advances on one hand; and we also have social problems like homelessness, excessive rubbish, and refugees on the other hand. Why are we not using the latest technologies to solve some these problems?”

According to Mr. Arif, “social entrepreneurship” is a combination of commerce and social issues in a way that improves the lives of people connected to the cause, while “design thinking” is a non-linear thinking method consisting of five stages, including empathize, define, ideate, prototype and test.

To make the audience better understand the concepts, Mr. Arif shared the stories of successful social enterprises in Malaysia and overseas that managed to deal with social issues as a commercial institution. He explained that design thinking can be applied in social entrepreneurship so that human-centric solutions can be devised to maximize improvement on social well-being. Mr. Arif’s interactive lecture drew lively discussion among participants; some novel ideas were created during the “Force Connect” and “Let’s Design” sessions.

Mr. Arif captured the students’ attention during the talk.

Prior to the public talk, Mr. Arif coached four teams of XMUM students who had some initial business start-up ideas. This was to prepare students for the upcoming entrepreneurship and innovation competitions at both national and international levels.

Mr. Arif advised the students to answer the question “why?” during the coaching session.

Mr. Arif Abdul Rahman is a consultant to the United Nation Development Programme. He works with Malaysian youth to build solutions that address some of Malaysia’s most pressing issues. He was a project lead in MaGic, a centre created to catalyse creativity and innovation for long term national impact. Mr. Arif worked with a development team to construct a shipyard in Azerbaijan, a landlocked country to the south of Russia, for 2 years. Upon returning to Malaysia, he worked as a trainer with Tandemic, an organization that translates innovation into action and impact.