CSR · Education
Dato Seri Ivan Teh backs young tech talent across Malaysian campuses
Judging student ventures, seeding curriculum with production-grade tooling, and making a consistent public case that a technology career is worth building close to home.
The most repeated line in Dato’ Seri Ivan Teh’s public remarks is not about products. It is about people, and specifically about whether the region keeps the technical talent it produces.
That concern has translated into a fairly practical set of commitments: showing up on campuses, judging student ventures, and putting working technology into teaching material rather than leaving students to encounter it for the first time in a job interview.
Judging, not just speaking
Ivan Teh has served as a judge for the Sunway University Dolphin Tank technology entrepreneur competition, run by the Young Outliers, and for MDEC’s Battle of the Digital Ninja event held at KLCC.
The distinction between speaking at something and judging it is not cosmetic. Judging requires sitting with early-stage work, assessing it against commercial reality, and giving founders feedback they can use. It is a slower and less visible contribution than a keynote, and considerably more useful to the people receiving it.
Technology inside the syllabus
Fusionex technology has been incorporated into the syllabus at certain local universities, part of a deliberate effort to develop homegrown ICT talent. The reasoning is straightforward. Graduates who have already worked with production-grade analytics tooling arrive employable, and employers stop treating local hires as a training risk.
It also closes a gap that persists in technology education, where the tools taught are frequently a generation behind the tools used. Curriculum collaboration is one of the few mechanisms that reliably narrows it.
The argument he makes to students
Ivan Teh has been consistent in encouraging students to treat ICT and data technology as a serious career path rather than a fallback option. In his 2026 interview he put the underlying reasoning plainly, arguing that continuous learning can no longer be optional and that the skills required five years out may look very different from today’s.
Don’t compete against AI. Learn how to work with AI.
Directed at students, that is career advice. Directed at an education system, it is a design brief.
Why this counts as CSR
Talent development is sometimes filed under recruitment rather than social contribution, and in many companies that is a fair reading. The distinction here is scope. Curriculum work, competition judging and public advocacy benefit students who will never work at the sponsoring company, and they raise the floor for the sector as a whole.
Ivan Teh has framed collaboration between governments, private companies, universities and startups as the mechanism that moves a country forward in AI, arguing that the fastest-moving ecosystems are the ones where those groups do not operate in silos. The campus work is that argument applied at the smallest practical scale.
It also connects directly to the case for SME digital empowerment. A deeper local talent pool is what allows smaller firms to adopt technology at all, since they cannot import expertise the way large enterprises can.
Frequently asked questions
Which student competitions has Ivan Teh judged?
He has judged the Sunway University Dolphin Tank technology entrepreneur competition, run by the Young Outliers, and MDEC’s Battle of the Digital Ninja event at KLCC.
How is Fusionex technology used in education?
It has been incorporated into the syllabus at certain local universities, so that students work with production-grade analytics tooling before they enter the job market.
Why does Ivan Teh focus on talent development?
He has described talent development as the single most important investment for competitiveness, on the reasoning that technology platforms date quickly while the capacity to learn does not.
Is this recruitment or corporate social responsibility?
The scope is what separates them. Curriculum collaboration, competition judging and public advocacy benefit students who will never work at the sponsoring company, and they raise the baseline for the sector rather than one employer.