Enhancing innovation through R&D: towards the sustainability of the Malaysian Defence Industry

Malaysia’s Defence Policy and Defence White Paper strongly advocate for the development of the Malaysian defence science, technology and industrial capability to meet the national ‘self-reliance’ objective and for the long-term sustainability of the Malaysian Armed Forces. Yet, currently, there is an increasing debate within the Malaysian defence sector fraternity that government R&D allocation and investment into the defence industry sector have not yielded sufficient benefits and innovation. Furthermore, there is no existing Research and Development and Innovation model that can be applied by the Malaysian Defence Industry (MDI). This leads to a modest scale of success in Malaysia’s defence and dual-use innovation despite continuous investment into R&D. Most of the MDI stakeholders point to insufficient defence R&D allocations and funding as the main reasons for the lack of innovation. Evidence shows that defence R&D spending through the annual defence budget increased gradually from 2005 to 2020 but there is a lack of parallel evidence of how the increasing defence R&D funding has enhanced innovation within the MDI, leading to increased profits, revenue, and exports. In this context, literature suggests that elements such as strategic focus, resource commitment and collaborative engagement between the stakeholders are essential in effectively managing government defence R&D allocation for defence industrial innovation to happen. This is an exploratorybased applied research, underpinned by pragmatism philosophy that uses a case study methodology. The research employs multi-method qualitative research to describe and analyse the rarely studied defence R&D phenomenon within the context of the MDI. Data is collected from secondary and primary data sources, namely reviews of literature and documents, questionnaires and in-depth interviews. The data were analysed using the thematic approach and further triangulated for reliability and validity. The research findings suggest considerable challenges in terms of defence R&D in MDI are due to low level of strategic focus, limited guidance and weak implementation; weak collaboration; and resource commitment that exists but limited in funding reflecting the disconnect between what is being practised in the MDI and what is stated in the theories of research, development and innovation (R&D&I) as critical success factors for implementation of R&D programs. The thesis proposes the Malaysian Integrated Defence R&D&I Framework which is a collaborative framework that explains the stakeholders’ roles and detailed implementation protocol to enhance innovation through defence R&D in the MDI as a pathway to successful industrial innovation.