Innovate, don’t play copycat

Is Singapore short of innovators that we need to go out and seek foreign companies to set up here?

Here is an article published in Today by Chow Penn Nee entitled Innovate, don’t play copycat: Minister (dated 17 June 2006).

Quoting excerpts of the article from Today,

This anecdote came from Mr Lee Yi Shyan, 44, Singapore’s new Minister of State for Trade and Industry and Minister-in-charge of Entrepreneurship.

“Businesses have to innovate, create a new business model to be successful. Innovation is not seeing other people selling a red bean bun and then you copying and selling that too,” he said, urging companies to create their own unique intellectual property……..

Without laying out any specific initiatives, Mr Lee said part of his focus would be to attract foreign entrepreneurial talent, drawing small medium enterprises to set up shop here.

To that end, the EntrePass — an Employment Pass for such foreign entrepreneurs — has been enjoying success, says Spring Singapore which assesses the applications. The two-year permit sees about 30 applicants every month from China, India, Malaysia and Africa, with a 60 to 70 per cent approval rate.

Reading the article made me thought of a comment I made once to the contributors team during our pub crawl. One of the perks of my job is that I have access to interested investors looking for new products. While I am back, being a practioner of my craft, I realized that there are a couple of things which we need to work on:

• Short of Innovations: Despite the strong demand from the private investors, we have a shortage of supply of innovators within Singapore. That also explain the lack of series A and seed stage funding in the country, because most investors are afraid of investing in high risk companies. The short term solution which the government have to apply is to bring in foreign talent. I am a firm believer of competition, and I see that the same kind of competition happen to the Americans and the British soils. The question, is whether Singaporeans can step up to the challenge.
• Impatience of young entrepreneurs: I find that this is a very common trait among young entrepreneurs both local and foreign. Most young entrepreneurs want to succeed and because of the desire of succeed, they take short cuts that damage their credibility. The high tech entrepreneurship is oversold on the basis of fundraising. I hear a lot of students walking up to me and pitching their idea. Here is a way to know whether I will reject you. First, I will ask you whether you have the proof of concept and two, I will ask you whether you have a team.
• Lack of Bootstrapping knowledge: There is a lack of young entrepreneurs who dare to adopt the bootstrapping strategy to do their business. A lot of them want venture capital, but did not realize that they end up as slaves to the venture capitalists.

I don’t think that we should give up hope on the locals but continue to encourage them to take up the challenge. Entrepreneurship is something that I find different from academic exams. If you are defeated today, it really depends whether you want to fight back. Most Singaporeans gave up, but there are some who don’t. Entrepreneurship is about bending around the system to make things work. If you give up because some people told you so, I don’t think that you can make it to be an entrepreneur.

I have met young aspiring Singaporean entrepreneurs, like Darran Nathan of Progeniq and Darius of tenCube. They have set forth a different kind of tone for their peers. It’s a hard business and I am really wondering whether there is a way for us to help young entrepreneurs to make their ideas to reality.

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