Why Katapult Asia?
The initial idea of Katapult is to help budding academic researchers and small and medium enterprises in their journey in translating their research output which had been developed into a working prototype demonstrating the unique features and performance of an existing or as new product. The journey to make this in-the-lab prototype demo into a commercially viable MVP (stands for minimum viable product) prototype is a stage that would require not only understanding which market segment to attack but the whole understanding of gathering the market and users requirements, building the materials and components supply chain, iterating the prototype ideas and testing them rapidly with the target customers, securing funding or the purchase order to deliver the 1st MVP and many others financial and organizational related activities to ensure a successful market validation and continuing the progress beyond the MVP.
The Idea to Market Translation (IMT) processes and methodologies were co-developed within a private organization managing funding to drive industry-academia collaboration and adopted. It has a proven track record with many new startups are incorporated to validate the research outputs and brought to market.
Our early journey as Katapult Asia Sdn Bhd started with projects related to community-based and indoor-based urban farming with startup companies Seedlab Farm (started at sainsusm laboratory in collaboration with researcher in Universiti Sains Malaysia), PasarKita (started due to excess of avocados planted by the founder’s mother) and open-source robotics education platform, SCUTTLE Robotics (founded within Texas A&M University’s mechatronic engineering program). Each of these projects has its own journey to serve unmet needs of their related market that could help us to refine further the IMT processes and methodologies.
Katapult Asia 