“…Yet, a deficient proportion of R&D expense by around a little over 1% of the GDP contributes to the slow increase of R&D activities and a very small number of granted patents.Malaysia has tie-in commercial and industrial linkages to other ASEAN countries, in particular Singapore, in addition to Japan, China, and India. With a strong focus of Malaysian industrial policies on FDI flow and knowledge spillover managed by MNEs through these international linkages(Cherif and Hasanov, 2015), efforts of creating Malaysian owned technology innovations by low absorptive capacity small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are undermined(Hashim, 2012; OECD 2013).Large MNEs in Malaysia do not necessarily lead to an effective way of knowledge and technology transfer to domestic firms(Thiruchelvam, 2011).R&D activities in MNEs are tightly conducted at their headquarters outside Malaysia, which have hindered further knowledge spillover to domestic firms and made the MSC fail to enhance interactions between multiple innovation actors(Evers & Gerke, 2015;Yusof, 2013).Approaching the ultimate achievement year of the Vision 2020 of Malaysia as an industrialist country, private sectors therein have increased their export. However, there have been widening discrepancies compared to their import volumes.The discrepancies might bring less harm directly to Malaysia's development.…”