Spurring Innovation in Indonesia

The prosperity attributes to people’s income. People’s income stems from salary or wage. Salary or wage is determined by the value of products. The more added value products than the more prices they have.

300 kg iron is cheap but 300 kg iron in the form of luxury car will be very expensive. 2 decades ago only small number of manufacturers could produce cell-phones, but now even fledgling manufacturers in China can produce them. The ordinary cell-phones experience decreasing value. To increase the value, Research In Motion (RIM) of Canada created stunning Blackberry which focus on their friendly connection with internet, Apple created incredible I-Phone with amazing design and unique features.

The efforts to increase people’s income are the efforts to add value of products. And innovation is the key to this goal. All the government policy should ensure that the companies operating in its own territory pursuing innovation for their products continuously. The tenet is to innovate or die.

Innovation is the mixed ingredients of education, risk taker innovation, crazy venture capitalist, rules of law and others which cannot be identified. Yes, there is no certain recipe to nurture innovation. Despite the success of Silicon Valley, it cannot be copied to other place like Boston Route 128.

However, the main ingredient of innovation is the innovative products. And then the important thing to make them accepted by market. And there no one or shaman knows about the future innovative products. There is someone who dare to gamble investing in new product without knowing what will happen. That is venture capitalist in United States or even the government such as in Singapore.

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Given this facts, Indonesia has a great challenge to spur innovation in this country. The downside of our nation pertaining innovation is we have no passion to work hard to create new products, instead we prefer the easy way to buy the license.

We can compare the automobile development in Indonesia and Malaysia. Until now we have no national automobile industry. The most popular car in Indonesia, Toyota Kijang, still depends on Toyota technology. It seems it will last forever. In contrast since the beginning Malaysia developed Proton despite it was Mitsubishi. And Proton shows its independence by buying the majority stake of Lotus. So the Malaysian can combine the technology of Mitsubishi and Lotus to develop its own national car.

Another example is electronics manufacturers, National Gobel. Previously, it was national electronics company with national trade mark Tjawang. Unfortunately in order to increase its capacity, Gobel invited Japanese Manufacturer, National. Tjawang disappeared, so did the chance of national electronics trade mark.

I don’t know what kind of Indonesia’s government policy on innovation. Or do they have one?

We have PT. INKA producing trains, but why did the government still import used trains from Japan. It's very silly. The INKA's products might not be as good as Japanese products, but they should be encourage to improve their product by giving them sustainable contracts.

We have also national trade mark such as Polytron. The government should help them by buying their products and giving them incentive to conduct research and development. We have Maetrika who nurtures Indonesia’s innovative starts-ups companies. The government particularly state-owned companies should support these innovative products so that these start-ups have enough cash to conduct research and development and create new products.

The government does has responsibility to support the innovative companies. It is not against free market. Even in United States the innovative company such as Hewlett Packard had been given contracts from the US government.

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