Introduction

The Innovative and Creative Circle (KIK) was first introduced in Universiti Malaya in line with the launching of ‘Malaysia Inovatif 2010’ by YAB Prime Minister. This was one of many initiatives to nurture the culture of creative and innovative among the civil servants in Malaysia. The KIK often emphasizes an initiation of team that focuses in developing novel ideas to improve the current system or tackle the impediment facing by civil servants in terms of providing an excellent service to the stakeholders.

The 2021 reviving UM KIK has been launched during the Townhall exhibition as part of the UM strategic plan 2021-2025. The UM KIK emanates under the pillar of talent, potentially beneficial from various aspects including:

• Commencing new systems, structure or standard operating procedures (S.P.O) that indirectly could enhance the quality and efficiency of providing service in UM through applying creative and innovative ideas;
• Teaching the element of collaboration solely to generate novel creative and innovative ideas for reviving the existing system or S.O.P;
• Imparting the value of systematic approach to unravel the problems;
• Enhancing the liaison among operational staff and management team through teamwork.

The primary objective of KIK UM is to revive the innovative and creative circle among UM executive and operational staff, parallel with UM's Core Values i.e. Passion, Oneness, Integrity, Sincerity, Empathy (P.O.I.S.E). This direction was established in accordance to the Malaysia Productivity Corporation (MPC) guideline. This bottom up innovation approach is to make sure that all 3,397 management & professional and support staff of UM internal stakeholders could aware of the current paradigm that requires continuous improvements in the processes/ output to add value to the existing systems, and exceed the expectation of UM customers and external stakeholders. To make this objective roll out, a number of strategies have been planned:

1. establishing the KIK structure comprising task force, steering committee and secretariat under the portfolio of UM registrar office and coordinators and assistant coordinators of the representative from all 27 Responsibility Centres to assist the KIK at grassroots;
2. organizing workshops and trainings to coach how to instrument the creative and innovative in work processes and future plan; and
3. to award those projects that have created impact and gained the excellent merit from the juries during the UM KIK convention.

Those awarded projects in social innovation or service delivery innovation categories are planned to be standardized, implemented, harmonized and monitored across UM, and potential projects to be commercialized. These projects will be further refined for being competitive in inter university creative and innovative rivalry in subsequent year. We hope the KIK initiative enables a creative and innovative culture among the community that could transform UM as a global university impacting the world.