Identify collaboration partners to help urban challenges facing cities in Malaysia

UK businesses with innovative solutions that could help improve cities in Malaysia are being encouraged to consider a new competition.

Competition to help urban regeneration in Malaysia

UK businesses with innovative solutions that could help improve cities in Malaysia are being encouraged to consider a new competition from Innovate UK and PlaTCOM Ventures, Malaysia (managed by the Newton Fund).

To help UK and Malaysian participants interested in this competition to meet and develop collaborative partnerships, the Knowledge Transfer Network, on behalf of Innovate UK and PlaTCOM Ventures, is organising a partnering webinar on 8th June. Find out more and register for this webinar here

Projects should address one or more of the following urban challenges:

Urban Mobility

Traffic congestion in Malaysia is a problem in most of the country’s major cities, with serious consequences for people’s health and economic productivity. Solutions to minimise urban congestion such as:

• improving public transport service
• increasing use of public transport
• enhancing the user experience through public service integration

will be considered within the following areas:

• data and systems integration
• service delivery
• first-mile and last-mile connectivity between transport nodes and people‚Äôs homes
• multi-modal transport connectivity

Urban Waste

Malaysian cities need to find new solutions to reduce the amount of waste that goes to landfill. The current situation has a negative effect on the urban environment, with dump-site pollution spreading to the air and water streams. Solutions that reduce the amount of waste going into landfill and increase the number of recycled resources have an important social, economic and environmental role to play in Malaysian urban areas.

Innovations that help Malaysian cities provide scalable solutions to their urban waste management challenges are being encouraged in:

• new affordable processes to recover, separate or extract valuable components from urban household or commercial waste streams
• development of new technologies for community-owned recycling schemes based on a viable ‚Äòcircular economy‚Äô model

Urban Water Management

Urban water management presents major challenges in Malaysia:

• non-revenue water (water lost in the distribution system before reaching consumers)
• urban flooding

Both challenges relate to climatic extremes faced by Malaysian urban environments including sustained droughts affecting water reserves and provision, and cloud bursts that put pressure on urban water management infrastructure. These events pose environmental and health risks to Malaysian urban citizens and require innovative solutions that would allow Malaysian cities to minimise the impact of climate extremes in one the following scope areas:

• water leak non-intrusive detection and management
• municipal flash flood detection
• urban flood response systems

These urban challenges will be discussed further at the Newton Fund Malaysia-UK Urban Innovation Partnering Webinar on 8th June.  Register now to secure your place.

Competition details available here