Demand for innovations, creative ideas keeps growing - Irwan Serigar

He said the cake for innovation and creativity kept getting bigger and entrepreneurs must captured the opportunity by being innovative and dynamic in their business models.

"Innovation continues to thrive and we need to develop the things that people want, not what you want," he said in his closing address at the Global Entrepreneurship Community 2016 (GECommunity 2016) and Malaysia Commercialisation Year Summit 2016 (MCY Summit 2016) here Friday.

GECommunity 2016 aims at connecting entrepreneurs, ecosystem leaders, policymakers, industry leaders, investors and community driver to build a vibrant global entrepreneurship community.

MCY Summit 2016 is the peak of MCY initiative which aims at facilitating local research and development products and services into the market by introducing appropriate commercialisation interventions, such as investment and market promotions.

Mohd Irwan said 2017 would be the startup year as the country would organise various programmes to promote startup businesses.

"The whole of next year, we're going to promote the startup ecosystem," he said.

However, he said, there was a need for a holistic change in order for startup ecosystem to flourish.

"Not only the government has to change, the private sector needs to open up, the regulators also need to change. There is a lot of hindrance.

"You must facilitate, don't frustate them or they will go somewhere else. So we need to continuously create this ecosystem, this is the government part," he said.

Mohd Irwan also suggested banks to change their mindsets towards startup businesses and help by providing funding for the business.