Multi-talented educator on a global mission
Professor Emeritus Tan Sri Dato’ Sri Dr Lim Kok Wing likes to quote from the examples of men and women whose passion to explore, discover and invent resulted in the amazing changes in the way we live today and the things we do.
These people, he points out, did not simply accept whatever was handed down to them. They defied the norms. They moved mountains to look for better solutions, better options. To them, nothing was impossible, nothing was unimaginable. In short, the types of people who dared to dream and dreamed to dare.
These are the people who believed that the future has always been about making the impossible possible, that the future has always been driven by the power of creativity, and that those who choose not to do ordinary things are always the ones to achieve extraordinary success.
People like Tan Sri Lim Kok Wing.
Tan Sri Lim had the vision to see a need where none previously existed. He had the passion to do something that had never been done before. And he had the tenacity and persistence to keep pushing forward to translate those ideas into reality.
In less than two decades, he founded and nurtured a school into a college and finally into the Limkokwing University of Creative Technology. Today, the university operates campuses across three continents with a globally recognised brand which has attracted over 30,000 students.
The campus in Malaysia alone hosts 9,500 students from 145 countries. Additional campuses are located in Indonesia, China, Cambodia, Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland and the United Kingdom. And more campuses are being planned, including one in New York.
Tan Sri Lim set new trends with the establishment of the university. He married creativity to technology, uplifting public perceptions of professions that were thought to be low-paying, low importance and low in social status.
When he introduced the word ‘creativity’ in his programmes in 1992 and tied it to technology, people were amused. Today, industry, government, commerce, health, finance and education all require creative input which links to new technology to stay ahead.
Tan Sri Lim explains how he did it. “You spend time to get the right mindset in place, change the thinking of people, reduce the resistance, pre-empt the questions and at the same time keep pushing forward, keep implementing so that people can see how an idea can be translated into reality, how something can be created which was never there before. People need a lot of determination to do what has never been done before.”