A Blueprint for Entrepreneurial Education in Singapore

In this article, I want to present a blueprint for entrepreneurial education in Singapore. It presents some ideas in a preliminary proposal which I am currently working on. Perhaps, to present these ideas is to draw debate and thoughts which can be further used to improve our technology cluster here.

How all these came about

“We expect our heroes to be flawed. Heroes without flaws would not be successful. Yet in the end, it’s not the flaws we need to remember but the achievements.”
- J. Young and W. Simon “iCon: Steve Jobs”

Yesterday, it was the 15th anniversary dinner of the NUS Entrepreneurship Society dinner. For the past nine months, I have been working with the students and finally, completing two big transitions for the society as their advisor. The first transition is to change the 7th Start-Up@Singapore to a fully student run national business plan competition and the second, a smooth transition of leadership and the engagement of the past and present alumni in the society.

On the same day, I received a phone call from the Cambridge-MIT Institute from UK to do a telephone interview. The purpose of the interview was to trace my progress as both an entrepreneur and facilitator of entrepreneurs. In that conversation, I discussed my involvement with two strategic initiatives (which culminated to me raising about £150K to implement and execute them). In these two inititatives, I ran a global entrepreneurship conference known as the MIT-$50K Global Startup Workshop and the UK-wide network known as ACUMEN. The knowledge transfer from MIT-$50K to Cambridge have also developed me into a biotech entrepreneur, setting up my own enterprise. When they came to the part, “What happened after that?” I told them about my current work in Singapore, other than being a full-fledged scientist, I am also involved now as the mentor to the NUS Entrepreneurship Society and helping them to transition to the way how MIT-$50K and Cambridge University Entrepreneurs are run. Finally, they ask me what the future lies for my work here since I have adapted the models I learned from them for NUS. I replied, “The models I adapt are only suitable to build a sustainable infrastructure and a strong student enterprise to reinforce the current entrepreneurial culture. In order for me to match my mentors back, I have to innovate and apply my model to the developing countries where the technology cluster just can’t work. To put it simply, if Singapore is to make it mark in the world, we need to build our own brand.” Why did I remember what I said? It was exactly what I have been thinking being involved in the entrepreneurial education work here in Singapore.

Before I came back to Singapore, I have originally written a paper about academic and student enterprise that I presented in the Oxford Singapore Forum. At the same time, I worked with a Fulbright research fellow on youth entrepreneurial attitudes and we had completed the final analysis. Hopefully, we can present this paper in the coming year.

I never believe that I should be an armchair critic on entrepreneurial education in Singapore. As I constantly reiterate that entrepreneurship is a contact sport, I have to implement what I have preached. I have worked and mentored the co-leads of the 6th Start-Up@Singapore (Gwen is one of them) through skype when I was in UK. These students created the conditions which were ready for the 7th Start-Up@Singapore to be fully student run. By the time I come back last September, my only job was to coach and train them into a proper team that is capable of transition to the next team. The first was to grill them very hard on the skills which they are the weakest and subsequently work on their tactical discipline as a team. I am never a believer of star players but I want a good and tight team. Of course, they have been totally immersed in my consistent mantra, “Branding, branding and branding.” The journey was hard but a rewarding one.

What makes MIT-$50K that distinguishes itself from all other entrepreneurial societies (BASES, Stanford), is that the institutional memory of their organization is extremely strong. The students in the future generations innovate and maintain the vision of the past leaders. In most student enterprise culture, the model for most students is to do “one hit wonders” and the valuable knowledge are destroyed in the process because they did not pass it on.

The transition may be complete, but there is still room for improvement. While listening to the speeches of the student leaders yesterday during the dinner, I was very glad and proud as their mentor that they realized what I was trying to teach them: the importance of team and branding. With a strong and passionate team, they realize that they can achieve far greater things than what they are. That’s the essence of student enterprise. You empower your students with dreams which they feel at times impossible, and when they fulfil their dreams by implementation, they feel confident and now ready for the next course.

So, the question now is, “What’s next?”

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