Encouraging Consortium, A Step in the Right Direction
July 22, 2009It is encouraging that the SMI Association of Malaysia would be assisting small medium enterprises (SMEs) to set up consortium in pulling their strengths to penetrate emerging economies such as China, Russia and India. It was indicated that the association would be studying the Japanese and Korean models.
This is similar to the effort made by Singapore as earlier discussed at this blog.
The key to the success of any form of groupings would be the value proposition of the grouping, its leadership, the protocol on how members of the group interact with each other and most importantly, how the value created is shared across the membership. Given that the main focus of business is to make profit and create value to shareholders, the final element is always the one that could make or break initiative of such nature.
It is hoped that the first request that would come out from this initiative is for government funding, as always the case in Malaysia. We should start thinking outside the norms and focus on our collective strengths rather than taking the easy way out by asking the government to provide the safety net to our businesses.
As the level of competitiveness gets more intense, outsourcing our success to the government may not be the wisest choice.
