Report Activity No.1

Program Description: This program is organized to provide a great opportunity for students from various institutions to compete and present their creative innovations in biotechnology. Given the theme “Empowering Nation: Towards a More Sustainable Future”, there are many categories of innovation for participants such as Environment/ Waste Treatment/ Biotechnology, Biofuel/ Renewable Energy and Green Building/Green Technology Product. Thus, students can choose and showcase their best innovation product. IBCEx’20 will be conducted online due to the pandemic of COVID’19. Participants will be presenting their innovative product to the juries through online platform and the juries will evaluate the participants based on the categories.
Date: 18th and 19th December 2020
Venue: Online Platform (Cisco Webex)
Organizer: Bioprocess Engineering Student Society (BIOSS) Universiti Teknologi Malaysia

6th International Biotechnology Competition and Exhibition (IBCEX 2020) is an annual program organized by Bioprocess Engineering Student Society (BIOSS), from School of Chemical and Energy Engineering, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Johor Bahru, Johor. This program was held on 18 and 19 December 2020 through online platform (Cisco Webex). One of the objectives of the program is to provide opportunities for local and international participants to introduce their innovations and further enhance their knowledge in the field of biotechnology.

I joined this program because I was pursuing my study in Bachelor Degree of Chemical Bioprocess Engineering, and through this program eventually I can get some motivation and inspiration to explore and pursue my career in the field of biotechnology in the future. Other than that, I wish to interact and work with my coursemate to be able to practise my communication skills and team working skills also get to know more about them.

This program consist of main competition, side competition, talk and forum. For main competition, it is an innovation project where participants from various institutions have to compete and present the creative innovation product. Given the theme “Empowering Nation: Towards a More Sustainable Future”, there are categories of innovation such as Environment/ Waste Treatment/ Biotechnology, Biofuel/ Renewable Energy and Green Building/Green Technology Product. Thus, participants can choose and showcase their best innovation product. The innovation could be in health care and pharmaceuticals, fermentation technology, food and drinks innovations, energy and environment management, or any other types of innovation related to biotechnology and green environmental. For side competition, participants are required to design a poster related to the theme and the poster will be upload to IBCEX 2020 Facebook page and Instagram. Apart from competition, there is talk entitled "From Innovation to Commercialization" [speakers: Nursyuhada Binti Mohd Shafawi (Patent Examiner of Intelectual Proper Corporation of Malaysia ) and Profesor Madya Ts. Dr. Noor Azurati Binti Ahmad @ Salleh (Director of Innovation and Commercialization Centre)]. On the last day of program, there is a forum entitled "Discovering the Real Impact of COVID-19 on Entrepreneurship" which the speakers will be Prof. Ida Idayu Bt Muhamad (Founder of Food & Biomaterial Engineering Research Group) and Mr. Redza Rahman (Director of R&D CTDK Holdings).

From this program, I was able to know the importance of Biotechnology and its role in sustainable future and also practise my thinking skills. The innovation project make me think of lots of consequences or effect that will bring to our mother Earth as the project not only focusing on the technology but eco-friendly and sustainability future. Other than that, the Q&A sessions on talk and forum also make me think out of the box.

Through this program, I was also able to practise communication skills, leadership and team working skills. All sponsorship executive are assigned to a WhatsApp group where we speak on the problems we faced, opinions and also having some discussion. Also we have a google drive where our task are assigned and written down there. This indirectly practise my leadership and team working skills. As a sponsorship executive, I have to call up to 100 companies a month to ask for sponsorship. My communication skills was directly enhanced as I have to prepare to speak in Malay, English, Chinese sometimes even Hokkien and Cantonese. At first, I have to make a cold call briefly explain the concept of our program and get their person-in-charge contact and email information to follow up with them in future. After that, I have to email our program paperwork, proposal, sponsorship prospectus to the companies. Next, if there is no respond from the companies, I will have to call them again for confirmation.

I have working experience as sales/promoter and this might be my self strength/advantage towards this activities. However, the experiences are still not exactly the same for both situations. For my working experience, I was approaching to customer face to face where I am able to look the customer in the eye and show them attracting flyer or product. In this requesting for sponsorship, I can only use words or sentence to approach to companies (not an individual) and this is the challenge I have to overcome. I have to speak more professionally and formal and I need to try my best to give the companies overview of our program in a short time. Other than that, there is also another challenge i faced which is time management. This is because mostly companies working hours are on weekdays and I have classes on weekdays as well. Thus, the available time for me to make calls is very limited and I have to seize every free time slot opportunity.