ABSTRACT
Summary: The Johns Hopkins University Center for Talented Youth (CTY) identifies and nurtures high ability pre-university youth. Although it has received considerable academic recognition worldwide over its 32-year history, international attention has broadened in the last four years to include CTY’s economic development potential. This interest appears to have been encouraged by research that connects innovation with a nation’s successful shift into knowledge-intensive industries. Malaysia was the first major adapter of the CTY approach to integrate education of highly gifted youth into plans for economic transformation. This chapter discusses Malaysian government and university interest in deepening the pool of youthful genius to encourage economic growth, generally, and the knowledge economy, in particular. It also describes how CTY helped establish the Malaysian version of CTY at the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM). The success to date of the Malaysian model called PERMATApintar (“Gifted Gems”) is considered as well.
