See thats the thing and I can only speak from my experience in the past. The main worry is that i dont want people to think the only way to start business is to win or even take part of such competitions.

For my naieve mind then, thats what i thought.

Thus the hyping or over hyping of such activites, in my opinion counter productive to entrprenaurship.

The other concern darius as your brought up is that such activites is contrary to being “hungry” enough to survive in the business environment. I personally see that in china, such activities are few, and thus the people there struggle and yet are hungry and thus as my point become great entreprenaurs. Again such compeitiions are contrary to the hunger. Why? Simple, you get people teach you how to be a businessperson, they fix your business plan if there are problems, give you money to start etc etc. So dont you think this is molly-codding all over agian?

though i think the real problem is not that competitions and grants and general incentives are bad, it’s just that it creates an illusion of achievement to those who get them.

To me, these are weapons, not medals.

Entrepreneurs should view them as chance to learn, chance to get exposure, chance to get some prize money and freebies. these opportunities can be very useful. weapons are not evil by themselves, just how you use them makes all the difference.

but the dangerous thing is that it is easy to see it as a medal, to see it as achievement and slack off. to let it rush to your head and forget about the real business building.

the real medal is satisfied, repeat, paying customers, until then, it’s just a vapour-enterprise, no matter how many awards you win.

( afterthought – what us singaporean see as molly coddling is seen as good business enviroment by some of my friends in China – if they get the chance, they will grab all the incentives they can get and yet not forget to focus on real business building )

Thank you for your reply. Hope that you will drop by more often here. Actually, the most appropriate and good comment on business plan competitions come from Douglas Abrams, the chief judge from Start-Up@Singapore, “There is no such thing as losers in a business plan competition, there are only winners and learners.”

Best regards,
BL

I can’t speak for such competitions in Singapore but we have recently helped the HK University of Science & Technology (www.chinaentrepreneurship.org) to organize their own competition. And even as a coordinator, it was an incredibly invaluable experience for me to have had the opportunity to meet these top executives based in HK.

Yes, you are right that it’s easy to start a business in Singapore, but it’s difficult to maintain it. One problem is that most entrepreneurs have this misguided idea that they don’t need an accountant, a lawyer and a financial banker to get their enterprises sustained. Hence it explains why most startups fail.

yours sincerely,
BL

I suppose you can call it the Winner’s Curse?

Hi ken,
I totally agree with you. It will be nice at least to analyse the factors that make our society so poor in entrepreneurship. Makes a good list for perhaps a entrepreneurship course for the people attend to realise the sub-conscious factors they wil have to deal with should they take this path.

1. “It’s easy to start business in Singapore.” That’s the paper work part, easy. But it’s hell tough to get business going.

2. Fundamentally the core of the Singapore system, society (or what call you) is not condusive to entrepreneurship. Period. There are certain ways that can’t be changed (not in short to middle term at least) so be glad that some changes are happening.

Nice article. I totally agree that the fear of failure is one of the bottlenecks why most people are not into entrepreneurship.

One interesting statistic to share. Most business plan competition winners don’t make it big. Usually, the runners up and semi-finalists made it into business finally. Even I was number 5 in the competition. But it turned out that we all started proper business in the end.

The reason is because after being defeated, we told ourselves that we are going to make it to show that the judges made the wrong choice. Btw, the only company that made it IPO (billion dollar company) in MIT-$100K business plan competition, Akamai, is a semi-finalist (i.e. they did not made it to the last ten). All the other winners of that year, we don’t hear from them anymore.