PROF. DR. RAJA SUZANA RAJA KASIM

Professor Dr Raja Suzana Raja Kasim holds Postgraduate Diploma in Entrepreneurship from the Cambridge Judge Business School, University of Cambridge, UK. She also holds PhD in Management from Universiti Putra Malaysia, and MSc in Information Management/Knowledge Management from Universiti Teknologi MARA. She has been running her own business in early childhood education while continuing her career in corporate sector prior to joining academic field. This includes positions with corporate sectors, leading posts in academic and local youth community-based organisations. Her international engagement includes; visiting scholars at Babson College, MA, USA, the Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Technology Venture Program at Stanford University, California, USA, Steering Committee at Cambridge International Academics, (R&D private division in Cambridge, UK), national consultant for SME Cleantechs performance under UNIDO, United Nation Industrial Development Office, Vienna, judges and mentors at startups local and global levels; and spearheads Heropreneur programmes at university.
She is currently a Professor of Entrepreneurship and Management at Universiti Malaysia Kelantan. Raja Suzana is also the Founding Director of Bpreneur Muda – a startup mentoring and coaching programme for youth entrepreneurship in Malaysia. Prior to co-founding the Smart Seeds Resources, and Smart Seeds Sdn. Bhd. – enterprises focusing on consulting of young entrepreneurs; she founded Social Enterprise Malaysia, a NGO that helped youth living in the marginalized communities in Malaysia launch and operate micro-businesses. She was also the founder of Pusat Perkembangan Kanak-kanak Elit Satu which runs pre-school and early childhood education. She is widely recognized as a thought leader on issues on youth startup and social entrepreneurship. Her main focus of work is on social innovation capacity and social impact evaluation. Raja Suzana has spoken widely on these topics in both local and Commonwealth countries. She has more than twenty years of experience in startup nation and is in charge of coordinating the Bottom 40 youth startup programmes at major universities, TVET institutions, youth NGOs and colleges in Malaysia. Raja Suzana works in close cooperation with Skills Development Division, Ministry of Youth and Sports Malaysia developing entrepreneurship incubator centers in 6 selected National Youth Training Institute. She is developing more than 200 youth startups, partnering with global mentor entrepreneurs as well as promoting excellence in entrepreneurial competency-based, social entrepreneurship, and social innovation capacity building. Her research, consultancy and teaching experience fall across a range of subjects centered on enterprise strategy, incubator programmes, positive youth development and social entrepreneurship issues. (rajasuzana@umk.edu.my).