An Interview With Sri Lankan Entrepreneur Heminda Jayaweera

April 2022

By Catherine Saez, WIPO

Can you talk about your personal and professional background, and how you became an entrepreneur?

I was raised in a rural area in Palewella in the Gampaha district. I first schooled at Palewella Maha Vidyalaya. After passing the Grade 5 scholarship examination I attended Royal College, Colombo which is one of the best schools in Sri Lanka. I studied electronic engineering and graduated in 2004 from the University of Moratuwa. I was not really focused on innovation or entrepreneurship as a career when I graduated. My main intention was to find a good job. I started working for the largest mobile telecommunication company in Sri Lanka, as an engineer. After 11 years, I realized I had a talent for finding solutions and thought about starting my own company. I failed a couple of times working on my own. In 2014, I supported a team of undergraduates from Moratuwa University and made my first investment in their company, Effective Solutions. By 2015, I had become a full-time serial entrepreneur.

What does it mean to be a serial entrepreneur? Is it someone who invests money in different startups, or someone who likes building up companies?

It is actually both. I started my entrepreneurial journey by investing in Effective Solutions. Later it became a mix of investing and acting as a co-founder. I am particularly interested in areas such as biomedical technologies, green tech, and supporting startups. I search for talent, and if there is a certain match, I invest or initiate new ventures. This has been my model since 2015 when I left my corporate life.

My first investment, Effective Solutions is now a medium-scale electronics and software company, focusing on the Internet of Things (IoT) with a 30+ staff. That was my first successful attempt at entrepreneurship.  Later on, we created another start-up, Jendo Innovations, with the same team. Jendo Innovations is a product-oriented company producing the first patented biomedical device in preventive medicine coming out of Sri Lanka. We are very proud of that.

After my initial success with effective solutions, I started three other companies. In 2017, I founded “Thuru”, a green tech social innovation company. The word “Thuru” means trees in the Sinhala language. Thuru introduces technologies to accelerate reforestation.  We have planted 100,000 trees in Sri Lanka so far.

In 2018, I launched Venture Frontier Lanka to support various innovations that are coming up from Sri Lankan universities. We help small-scale startups, and after a few hiccups due to Covid-19, we are now back on track.

In 2019, just before the Covid-19 crisis, I started an organization with my co-founder of Thuru, called Zero Trash, which recycles plastic, glass, and metal. We started as a collector and identified a solution for the weak links in the value chain of the recycling operation. Now we have a fully-fledged facility operating close to Colombo, collecting 10 tons of plastic per month. This is about 300,000 bottles. Then we preprocess and send the plastic to various recyclers. We are looking at various technologies to come up with the recycling process as well.

I worked as a consultant for the University of Moratuwa in 2017, to help them to build a startup incubator. We managed to launch about 30 startups in the following two years. Some of those startups are still running and doing well.

You were also the COO of the Sri Lanka Institute of Nanotechnology (SLINTEC). What were your main objectives there?

SLINTEC is a public-private partnership and the most advanced research institute in Sri Lanka. The Board of Directors heard about my startup incubator’s success and in early 2019 offered me the position of Chief Operating Officer. I never wanted to go back to corporate life, but I thought this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity so I accepted. At the same time, SLINTEC’s CEO was retiring from his position and was not replaced, so I was the head of the organization for two years.

When I joined SLINTEC I did not know anything about nanotechnology but I was selected for the job because they wanted someone able to take products to the market. I tried to connect the research produced by the institute with industry. In 2019, SLINTEC had been operating for about 10 years and had commercialized only six innovations. During my two-year tenure, we managed to commercialize twelve new products, exactly double what they did in the previous ten years.

We used the design thinking approach to design, develop and market our products. We connected with industries at a very early stage of the research by entering into collaborations, with a focus on commercialization.

In addition, we built a graphite to graphene transformation plant, one of the largest in the Asia-Pacific region. The plant was developed by Ceylon Graphene Technologies (CGT), which is the joint venture between LOLC and SLINTEC. SLINTEC transferred the patented technology to CGT and the entire plant was designed by SLINTEC engineers. The plant is operational and SLINTEC is now looking at sales across the world, to countries like Europe and the US.

What is graphene?

There are many methods to produce graphene. In Sri Lanka, we have this unique graphite type called vein graphite, it is the purest form of graphite deposit in the world. For graphene, we take one to five atomic layers out from graphite, the thinnest material known to man, which has unique properties and endless potential applications. It is harder than diamonds, has an electrical conductivity that exceeds silver, and has excellent heat conduction. Graphene was only discovered in 2004 by two researchers from the University of Manchester, in the United Kingdom. It is now dubbed the wonder material.

What would you say are key ingredients from research to delivering products on the market?

We realized many researchers were focusing on creating new knowledge, which is essential, but forgot about the user. Researchers were creating new knowledge, potentially patentable, but when it came to actual production level, issues arose, such as high production costs, or the intended use case was too far away from reality. We tried to bridge that gap. When I first joined SLINTEC, one of the first initiatives that I took was to prioritize a dozen research projects out of the 300 ongoing projects. Looking at the research through the commercialization and investment lenses is important to convert a project from a lab-level commodity to an industry-scale operation.

How is IP integrated into the work of SLINTEC, and managed?

During my tenure, we shifted the initial model which was to patent a lot of fundamental research results. We started applying for patents only once we had a prototype and knew how to take the product to the market. This model really helped in the commercialization of products and attracted investors who also helped with the patenting costs. The traction of the product in the market is the most important factor.

Would you say that Sri Lankan universities are usually equipped with a technology transfer office?

Ten years ago, almost no university had a technology transfer or intellectual property office. IP was just a theory. Recently, with the help of WIPO and various organizations, almost all universities in Sri Lanka have a technology transfer office, and Technology and Innovation Support Centers (TISCs). Those offices provide IP advice and information to students and researchers.

What would you say can help SMEs and MSMEs develop in Sri Lanka?

Most companies in Sri Lanka, even large-scale ones focus on simple low value-added products. There is a lack of focus on Research and Development (R&D). For example, Sri Lanka is famous for tea and many companies are producing tea but in countries like China, there is a lot of R&D on tea extracts, and how those extracts can be used in products such as pharmaceuticals. To reach global markets the R&D factor is very important. At least five percent of SMEs' profit has to be invested in R&D. They also have to consider that innovation and IP protection are their only chance to enter the market since they cannot compete with large companies that can benefit from economies of scale.

What are the most promising sectors for the Sri Lankan industry?

It is important to look at areas where Sri Lanka has some intrinsic advantages, and add value to those products, such as vein graphite, which is only found in Sri Lanka at high levels of purity. The same goes for cinnamon. True cinnamon is found only in Sri Lanka. The country also can develop its mineral industries, in particular Ilmenite and Apatite. Sri Lanka has been identified as a biodiverse hotspot with unique climate conditions and particular fauna and flora. We are looking at industries, such as pharmaceutical and biotech companies that can develop plant-based or plant-derived new products.

Sri Lanka also has a unique traditional medicine “Hela wedakama” from which a huge scope of plant-based products can be developed. What we need is a scientifically demonstrated range of products that stem from ancient knowledge.

The country’s software industries as well as its growing expertise in IoT and AI are also sectors with growth potential. Sri Lankans' brains can work on very specific areas like IoT and AI-based solutions. We need to look at smart agriculture as well. We have diversified climate zones and can be a test base for the entire world for new agricultural technologies. We are currently testing biodegradable materials that can be added to soil to change its structure to halve the water needs.

Are young entrepreneurs aware of IP protection?

Sri Lankans still remain afraid of IP. They think if they come up with something new, they should not share their ideas. They need to understand how the IP framework can support them and provide protection for their innovation. If you keep your IP to yourself, nothing will happen. The young generation should focus on taking their ideas/products to the market rather than just thinking about protecting their IP.

If you were to give three pieces of advice to young entrepreneurs, which would they be?

The first one is that they have to keep away from the idea that you need a lot of knowledge before getting into innovation. This is the wrong model. You have to start now, today is the day. Your first innovation might not be successful, you might fail, but you have to start today, and put your ideas into real practice.

The second would be that the most important ingredient for success is the traction of their product on the market, the commercialization aspect, even before IP protection.

The third one is that time is of the essence and if you want to gain speed you have to collaborate. If you think as an individual, it will be difficult to gain traction. Collaboration means getting into very diverse teams, geographically diverse and diverse in areas and competencies. You have to collaborate with investors, marketers, and lawyers. If you don’t understand the need for collaboration from the very early stage of your project, you will not gain the speed that you want to take your product to the global market.