THURSDAY, 15 NOVEMBER - The Centre for Industry and Community Network (CICN), Universiti Malaysia Sabah (UMS) recently hosted the UMS Academia Industry Community Award 2018 (AICA 2018) in Kota Kinabalu.

The dinner was officiated by the Deputy Chief Minister cum Minister of Trade and Industries Sabah, Datuk Seri Panglima Wilfred Madius Tangau.

In his speech, he said the collaboration between university and industries are crucial of nations innovation systems.

“The benefits of university-industry linkages are wide-reaching. They can help coordinate research and development (R&D) agendas, stimulate various R&D opportunities and exploit synergies of scientific and technologies capabilities.

“University-industry collaboration can also expand the relevance of research carried out in public institutions, foster the commercialization of public R&D outcomes and increase the mobility of labour between public and private sectors,” he added.

Meanwhile, the Chairman of Board of Directors UMS, K Y Mustafa said the relationship with community counterparts is very important to UMS as helping the community in Sabah is one of UMS’s key mission to provide a better opportunity for the local community, to gain more knowledge and to enhance their socio-economic status as well as helping the development of Sabah.

“Currently in UMS, we are excited to share that we are in the process of starting a centre for Communications for Development, also known as C4D, with the financial and knowledge base support of UNICEF. C4D is a communication approach used by social development practitioners to support their projects whether they are in agricultural, education, health, legal, poverty alleviation, human rights or any other sectors.

“Through this centre, UMS will be more effective in carrying our community engagement projects which involves the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG),” he said. 

K Y Mustafa also mentioned that UMS is conducting knowledge transfer projects where numerous grants from the industries as well as the Knowledge Transfer Programme (KTP) grants from the Ministry of Education (MoE) are given to UMS.

“These enable UMS to reach to communities by transferring our expertise, knowledge training, and consultancy in technical and information technology as in line with the University’s direction in transforming towards University Industry 4.0 and significantly improve the community socio-economic status,” he added.

AICA 2018 is held to commemorate UMS’ linkages and activities with its local Industry and Community partners over the past two years. It was attended by 200 guests consisting of over 50 industry partners, 20 community partners and their UMS counterparts.

There were three set of awards given during the dinner, The UMS High Impact University-Industry Engagement Awards, The UMS High Impact University-Community Engagement Award and UMS Special Award.

Faculty of Business, Economic and Accountancy won the UMS High University-Community Engagement Award, whilst Faculty of Computing and Informatics won the UMS High Impact University-Industry Engagement Award.

Meanwhile the UMS Special Awards are given to three awardees, YTL Corporation; Yayasan Azman Hashim and Evergreen Livestock Sdn. Bhd.

All the winners and award recipients of AICA 2018 will be shortlisted as nominees for Majlis Anugerah Jaringan Akademia-Industri (AINA) 2019 organized by MoE.