Commentary: When It Comes to Innovation, Joko's Ministers Need a 'Mental Revolution'
Using nothing more than salvaged parts and skills he acquired from years of working as a technician at an electronics repair shop, Muslim bin Amri, known as Kusrin, has produced hundreds of working cathode ray tube television sets from his workshop in Karanganyar, Central Java.
By doing so, he was answering the basic need for information and entertainment for the many Indonesians who can't afford flat screen TVs. That is, until the local prosecutors office raided his workshop, confiscating as many as 161 homemade televisions he had built and charging him with violating the country's trade laws.
Prosecutors argued that his creations did not meet the required Indonesian Standard Certification, or SNI. Nor were they sold with instruction manuals, as required by law.
Kusrin was last month sentenced to six months' imprisonment and fined Rp 2.5 million ($180.76). His televisions were destroyed on Sunday and sent to a local landfill, with prosecutors inviting local media to witness the destruction in the hopes others will not follow his footsteps.
The case resonated with netizens across the country who quickly turned to social media to defend Kusrin, a budding entrepreneur who had his dreams crushed before his ventures even blossomed. On social media, users also vented their frustration at how our government has reacted to innovations and ingenuity: regulate them.
As Internet penetration continues to grow exponentially with more and more Indonesians become a part of an increasingly connected world, so does the emergence of tech-savvy pioneers who disrupt the traditional business models – a phenomenon many established companies failed to anticipate.
These pioneers cater to some previously untapped markets, delivering goods and services in innovative ways or selling things we never realized we wanted in the first place.
Some of these pioneers respond to people's needs by simply linking them to others who could fulfill them. With their apps, they link globetrotting backpackers with homeowners who rarely use their extra bedrooms (AirBnB); commuters with car owners sick of having their vehicles sitting idly in their garage or office parking lot all day (Uber); or people in need to navigate through Jakarta's notorious traffic quickly with motorcycle taxi drivers wasting half the day roaming around the city just to search for their next passenger (GoJek).
During his 2014 campaign, President Joko Widodo argued that the creative industry, innovation and hard work will be the backbone of Indonesia's economy for years to come and promised to nurture creative and innovative entrepreneurs by providing incentives, easy access to loans and copyright protections, as well as favorable policies and programs.
But when ride-hailing app Uber began taking prominence among Indonesian commuters, senior officials inside Joko's administration quickly sided with established taxi companies who feared the app would take away their customers, deeming the California-based start-up illegal. Law enforcers and Transportation Ministry officials soon declared war on Uber drivers, even forming a team of officers to pose as customers in bid to take them down.
Indonesian tech start-ups like GoJek would also fall victim to this short-sighted bureaucratic rigidness, narrowly escaping a clampdown in December when Transport Minister Ignasius Jonan announced a ban on the use of personal vehicles for public transport, including motorcycle taxis, traditional or app-based. The restriction was rebuked less than 24 hours later by the president himself.
"Don't let the people be burdened because of regulations," Joko said on his official Twitter account, telling reporters later that innovation by the younger generation should not be restrained and applications such as GoJek exist because they are needed by society.
But his cabinet members don't seem to grasp the subtle cues hidden behind his statement: that they should be flexible to innovations and that regulations are there to serve the good of the people and not restrict them.
Led by Joko's newly created Creative Economy Agency (Bekraf), the administration has been campaigning hard against pirated music and film, a monumental task with major theater chains and television stations enjoying a monopoly over what people can watch. Those seeking to enjoy independent films or television series not aired in Indonesia, have little choice but to buy pirated DVDs or illegally stream and download them online.
But when a business model where people could legally watch such movies and shows finally arrived in Indonesia in the form of Netflix, officials and regulators quickly mulled on making the subscription-based provider comply to Indonesian broadcasting and information technology laws and censorship standards.
Like many of their counterparts across the globe, Indonesian bureaucrats are used to handling established businesses and companies, where goods are produced in an industrial scale and services are provided by few to many.
But technology has allowed for the collaboration of hundreds if not thousands of small, independent and informal businesses and individuals, changing the way people acquire their goods and services, and thus our way of doing business.
The business model of the 21st century is more people-powered than corporate-driven. Its participatory nature allows for experimentation and adaptation of how people do business. These businesses are constantly evolving and reinventing themselves so much so that it would be futile to even attempt to regulate them, for such rules and regulations may not even be relevant in a few years to come.
Joko's administration has been rolling out a red carpet to foreign investors and companies, introducing a series of economic stimulus which includes more deregulation. Why can't the government do the same for innovative companies and individuals like Kusrin who are trying to address some of the issues as Joko has been trying to achieve: create jobs, improve people's welfare, dampen the impact of a global economic slowdown and tackle the country's transportation woes.
The president has repeatedly mentioned the need for Indonesians to undergo a so-called “mental revolution.” He can start by making sure the ministers in charge of carrying out his visions don't have a 20th-century mentality.
Nivell Rayda is a news editor at the Jakarta Globe and author of "This Home Was Never Mine." The views expressed are his own.
Tags: Keywords: