KUALA LUMPUR, May 15 — “They seem to be doing a lot of good things,” says Patrick Grove, founder and chairman of Catcha Group, when asked for his thoughts on the impact of the Malaysian Global Innovation and Creativity Centre (MaGIC) in the one year it has been in existence.

Indeed, while a handful will still claim that it is not doing enough, one suspects Malaysians will side with Grove when assessing MaGIC as a one-year-old organisation, and which, until its sixth month, was still trying to hire the right people to help it drive its mission.

To give the ecosystem a better idea of what exactly it has done over the past year, MaGIC has just released its first-year impact report, listing the programmes, activities and number of participants. But anyone who wants to stay abreast of what MaGIC is doing in real time should really follow its their twitter feed @MagicCyberjaya.

While a look through the impact report may give one the impression that MaGIC is perhaps doing too much and spreading its 55 employees too thin, “everything we do is out of necessity,” says its chief executive officer Cheryl Yeoh (pic above), adding that the agency has a lot of stakeholders to please.

One thing that will keep her stakeholders very happy is establishing Malaysia as a regional star-tup hub. And this is why Yeoh says she is most excited over the coming MaGIC Accelerator Programme (MAP) in June, adding that it is the one programme in a busy calendar that it has to execute flawlessly.

“It is such an ambitious programme, being the first large regional accelerator,” she declares.

Targeted at startups in Asean (the Association of South-East Asian Nations), the hope is that a successful MAP will quickly help Malaysia develop a reputation as a leading startup hub in Asia.

That, in fact, is the bold new vision statement Yeoh has put on her shoulders: For MaGIC to be the top startup hub in Asia. That means topping Taiwan, South Korea, Japan and Singapore.

Vision statements are supposed to be bold, she declares.

At the same time, she is also excited about the social enterprise responsibility that MaGIC has been asked to drive.

While that world was new to her when she took up the MaGIC role, returning from the Silicon Valley, Yeoh is now well aware of the world of Social Enterprise.

She observes that people are so into social entrepreneurship in developing countries including Malaysia, as they see many issues that need solved which cannot wait for a top-down approach.

MaGIC has been going to the ground all over the country to promote and introduce the concept of the ‘Social Enterprise,’ and has engaged with as many stakeholders as possible. In doing so, it discovered that the concept was very new to many who were already practising it.

“We received appreciative comments and emails from people thanking us for introducing the term ‘Social Enterprise’ to what they were doing in their communities. So that was gratifying,” Yeoh says.

That Social Enterprise role of MaGIC has now been further crystallised with the launch of the Malaysian Social Enterprise Blueprint by Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak earlier this week.

The thrust of the blueprint is to help social entrepreneurs build more robust sustainability models around their initiatives. This has been the single biggest cAe of the failure of so many such programmes.

MaGIC hopes to reverse this with its Social Enterprise Blueprint. — Digital News Asia

* This story was first published here.