Two companies received a total RM1.54 million (US$405,000) today under a RM100 million research grant scheme, while approvals for 17 other applicants are in the pipeline.
MDC's venture capital arm MSC Venture Corporation has also approved funds for the first four start-ups it is seeding under a RM120 million venture capital fund, and is set to formalize two of the investments next week. (See related story)
The funds come as a relief to some applicants who had expressed anxiety over the long wait.
MDC executive chairman Othman Yeop clarified that the process to evaluate and approve took time because of inexperience on the part of some applicants.
"Some of the companies have no idea how to submit R & D proposals. You have to handhold them and that takes awhile. Some applicants were also not quite clear about their end-product and how they were going to mobilize the intellectual force and link-ups with academia," he said after the grants were handed out today.
Earlier, Education Minister Musa Mohamad cited the World Competitiveness Report for 1999 which ranks Malaysia No 42 for spending a mere 0.2 percent of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on R & D, and No 24 for private sector-university cooperation.
He said he was encouraged to note that the grant recipients had initiated linkages with universities to conduct joint R & D projects.
Nine companies have received a total of RM15.9 million so far from the MSC R & D grant scheme (MGS).
The two recipients today were Values First Consulting Sdn Bhd and PUC Founder (MSC) Sdn Bhd which were granted RM686,000 and RM854,000 respectively.
Value First Consulting is developing "ObjectTool", a family of software products to speed up integration of semiconductor equipment in factories, while PUC Founder (MSC), is developing "FingerTec", a fingerprint identification system based on technology transferred from China's Peking University.
A 1997 recipient of the grant VMS Technology Sdn Bhd also launched today an Internet telephony product called BlueJade TECS aimed at the small office/home office market.
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