Singapore should consider Intrapreneurship rather than Entrepreneurship

Unlike other governments, the Singapore Government has been a strong advocate of entrepreneurship. From fundraising to assistance to small-medium enterprises, they have done a significant amount in promoting and encouraging entrepreneurship. However, both the risk-adverse culture and the critical mass are barriers for such a culture to occur. These crucial factors made Singapore a better candidate for intrapreneurship rather than entrepreneurship. This article argues why Singapore is better for intrapreneurship rather than entrepreneurship and makes a bold suggestion to the civil service and government-linked companies since they are the major employers for most Singaporeans.

Intrapreneurship refers to the creation of an innovative enterprise within an organization. Unlike entrepreneurship, the intrapreneur has a couple of advantages: capital depending on the size of the company, physical infrastructure, salespeople, support people, and a brand (if it is a big multi-national company). With an endowment of resources, the intrapreneur needs to do the most difficult part, that is to connect the dots and create an enterprise within. For example, some MNCs have set up venture capital groups within to do investments on companies which they deem as emerging disruptive technologies against their own. Other cases include a new product development which could be difficult to implement within the major units of the company. These are the situations where intrapreneurs can be born and made.

So, why is Singapore suitable for intrapreneurship? Let us examine a few factors:

• Risk Adverse Culture: Most Singaporeans are risk adverse and are afraid of breaking from the status quo. The dropout rate for being an entrepreneur (without any resources) is far too high compare to their stable job. In the intrapreneur scenario, they are able to exercise creativity within the organization and still get paid the same salary. Of course, the intrapreneur has to compromise part of their crazy and wacky ideas for a pragmatic and slightly “out of the box” plans for their intrapreneurial enterprise.
• Meritocracy revisited: Oftentimes, in Singapore, everything is dependent on your paper. Your grades from PSLE to university has decided whether you are a scholar or a statistic. Our government has adopted the view that if they spend a million dollars on your education, they will guarantee you a great position without really putting you to the test. In Singapore, you are booted out from that privileged position by screwing up rather than making an impact. If the non-scholars and scholars can compete on platforms that encourages intrapreneurship (i.e. create value for the big organization), that will be meritocracy at work.
• The big resources not on the hands of the entrepreneurs: At the moment, Singapore does have a critical size of patents and innovations. Most of them are under A-STAR which prefer the licensing option rather than the startup option. Even the inventors realize that there is no point for them to start a company because they don’t want to sacrifice their large paychecks to be an entrepreneur and fail. One can create a model where we turn some of these people as intrapreneurs and subsequently shift them out when they succeed. In some sense, this handholding might help most Singaporeans who are so afraid to fail.

If you are convinced by the reasoning above, the question will be how to implement it. The answer is that we should start from the civil service. Of course, bureaucracy seems to exist within all sectors of Singapore. The real question for the people who promote entrepreneurship is the following: if they don’t want to take risk, why should we care? What if we force them to take risk within their safety net? So, here are some crazy ideas:

• Assess Civil Service staff not by paper but by impact: You hear about talented lawyers like Mr Wang who quit the civil service because he hit the ceiling point for not being a scholar. Perhaps, the civil service needs to institute project-based work to assess teams of people and perhaps, offer a growth opportunity for these people. If Google can give one day free for their workers to innovate, we can do the same from the ministry of manpower to the ministry of health.
• Initiate an Intrapreneurship movement: Actually, ninety percent of the Singapore market are dominated by the multi-national corporations. Instead of asking the entrepreneurs to reinvent the wheel, why don’t we ask the MNCs to implement their intrapreneurship models in Singapore? Google and 3M are companies where we can take some best practices from. The real difficulty is to find the projects that can help the organization while at the same time, induce intrapreneurship.

Actually, we are productive and efficient, according to most people out in the world. Social compliance has stopped us from being creative and innovative. In order to foster entrepreneurship, the change from within might be a better option. So, perhaps, for the policy makers, you should give intrapreneurship a try.

Related posts:

1. After CEO Unplugged-Intrapreneurship at NUS Entrepreneurship Week
2. Intrapreneurship in an Asian context. Possibility or Myth?