Ethos Issue 5, Nov 2008

Singapore as Innovation Nation
Conversation with John Kao

The kind of innovation that is increasingly important is not about coming up with a new way to design, for example, a teapot, but actually transforming innovation into something that yields broad new streams of opportunities. This scale of innovation requires a great deal of human capital and infrastructural investment. So even if you had a very vibrant venture capital industry as the US does, it is not necessarily going to be enough to ignite an entire industry. You need support in academic research, basic science and so on.

Yet in societies where you only have top-down development of ideas, there is a great potential for getting it wrong because governments are often not very good at the business of picking winners. So every society is going to be a blend of government action complemented by innovative entrepreneurial behaviour on the part of the public. The question is really what the balance between the two should be.

Many countries are now adopting innovation as an organisational principle—
not just for how they coordinate their resources and development, but also in terms of how they plan to compete on the global stage. An innovation strategy is really about focusing on the most important agendas, having some sense of priority and matching resources against those priorities, because no country can do everything.

What’s interesting about innovation is its potential to lead to non zero-sum outcomes, in the sense that the more we have countries that are innovative and the more fruits of innovation are shared, the more humanity’s overall innovation capability increases, presumably with benefits for all of us.

In your view, what approaches to innovation might Singapore successfully pursue?
Your expectations are going to be the keys to your outcomes. So if your expectation is that you’re going to be a platform for the innovative activities of others—based on decades of experience as a platform for multinationals and certain kinds of technical development—then that’s likely what will happen.

Certainly, being a sort of system integrator makes sense for Singapore. There is money, sound business practice, IT, financial engineering and human capital here, where wild and crazy entrepreneurs from elsewhere can come to create new things in a competent environment and split the upside with Singapore. Perhaps there will be some trickle-down in the process to local entrepreneurs over time. It’s not a bad strategy.

Yet it would be a pity to stop there, because my impression is that there are many smart, really creative, cosmopolitan people here who, given the right circumstances, could be every bit as accomplished as entrepreneurs in any part of the world, bringing world-changing ideas to fruition using Singapore as a platform. So therefore I think you shouldn’t just think about Singapore as an enabler because then you’ll only be an enabler.

I think the cultural milieu in Singapore will eventually evolve to a point where creative risk-taking, expeditionary activities like those you see in Silicon Valley become an everyday occurrence. But because this will take time, it might be useful to start thinking about setting up creative enclaves—like some companies in Finland—in which entrepreneurial and innovative activities can flourish with a certain degree of insulation from the external environment, where the right mix of talent is freed up from responsibilities for a good length of time and given access to resources to make a serious foray towards big expeditionary goals.

How should government and public service capacity evolve in order to better support an innovation nation?
I think there is a need for real clarity about what innovation is: that it’s not just science, technology, creativity or improvement, but that it occupies a spectrum of concerns that many people are engaged with. My sense is that for the public sector to really drive the innovation agenda in Singapore, it needs to move on to a 2.0 conceptualisation of what innovation is and also what skills can manage it.

So what do the managers of innovation need to do? It’s not that they need to know about brainstorming. Instead, they have to know how to foster collaboration so that emerging possibilities become visible. They must understand how to create alliances across disciplinary boundaries. They need to be able to craft a vision for their work group, and know which talents to bring in or what activities they should be involved in. They need to make useful exceptions. They need to be conscious about their willingness to encourage risk-taking and exploratory behaviour, and accept that a certain percentage of these ideas is not going to work out. All these are very subtle skills.

I’m not worried about Singapore being able to continue as a well-engineered society with well-engineered processes. I am, however, concerned about Singapore’s ability to think in a very expansive way about the future and put enough effort into that task so that real fruit comes out of it.

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