In 2005, TechTop’s trustees who have spent all their life in science and technology had seen the lack of curiosity in a new generation of engineers who were taught from text books to pass their examinations and secure their degrees. Students lacked a genuine interest around 16 students from MIT, Asia School of Business (ASB) Malaysia, will join hands with 32 students from India to find technological solutions for our nation’s felt needs and growing societal problems. To hunt for problems and find solutions on their own. The Trustees were seeing more and more engineers who never engineered anything new discovered something fascinating. Research, development and fabrication were new words to this generation of students. The Trustees felt that these youth had stopped being rebellious and revolutionary in their attitudes, and had lost the ideal of becoming socially conscious good samaritans. They were assembly-line products with the same attitude, aptitude and assertiveness to get a well-paid secure job so they could continue to live the rest of their life without challenging the existing status quo, and with no social commitment.
The Trustees therefore took a conscious decision to form a Charitable Trust that would work relentlessly to bring old values back into education – to bring back genuine curiosity by promoting “innovation and making’ from early schooling age onwards. Thus the TechTop Charitable Trust was founded in 2006.
This is when they realised that the competitors in the fields of sports and arts found instant celebrity when they achieved something. However, that was not true in the field of innovation – no one celebrated an inventor’s invention. How could you expect new inventors in such circumstances? Hence, the idea of the TechTop National Innovation Challenge was mooted in 2006 itself.
Since that day, we are happy to announce that we have directly encouraged over 16000 youngsters to take to the exciting path of innovation and entrepreneurship. Our mission and vision is to create inventors and entrepreneurs who have both social consciousness and environmental commitment.
Please click the dates below to see and review winning innovations in each year of the TechTop Innovation Challenge since 2006.
