| |
15 November 2002
Speech By Mr Teo Ming Kian, Chairman, Economic Development Board At The Nanyang Technology University Technopreneurship & Innovation Graduation Ceremony On 15 Nov 2002, At The Nanyang Technological University At 3.00pm
Dr Cham Tao Soon, President, NTU
Distinguished guests
Ladies and gentlemen
Good afternoon.
- I am delighted to attend this inaugural Technopreneurship and Innovation graduation ceremony to celebrate with you the conclusion of your program. To all the graduands, congratulations! Your achievement today is the fruit of your own entrepreneurial passion and the encouragement of your faculty, family and friends.
- But today does not mark a destination. It is just the beginning of a journey. And whether you will continue with this journey or sustain the long road ahead, will depend very much on your own aspiration, which I believe you have demonstrated by being on this program in the first place, and your stamina on this marathon. For a marathon this will be, and a bumpy and an exciting one at that. It will not be for the faint hearted.
- Some may harbour the illusion that being an entrepreneur is a sure road to wealth and happiness. That cannot be a greater illusion. No doubt that there have been many success stories. We have heard about the Rockefellers, the Bill Gates. We have heard how during the Internet boom, when everything about Internet, even a single-page proposition with the mention of dotcom would attract huge investment and would make many millionaires. It is probably no different from the time of the start of the automotive industry when everyone would have the word 'Motor' in its company name.
- But that belied the many wannabe Rockefellers and Bill Gates who had fallen by the wayside. The success stories did not tell the full version of the grit, guts and gumption that passionate entrepreneurs had to go through, before they achieved their dreams. They must first have the great business idea based on substantive innovation. They are sustained by a driven ambition to make a big difference to themselves and to the world, by not being deterred by the first failure or by giving up on the second.
- Perhaps going on the entrepreneurial path would be a leap of faith on your part. Entrepreneurship is about dreams, risk and perseverance to make the dreams come true. All of these are associated with uncertainty. But with the uncertainty, lies the prospect of great rewards. To some, the rewards may be the great pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. To others, they consider it reward enough to change the world in the way things had been done before, very often with disruptive innovations. Disruptive innovations have been responsible for dramatically changing the world. I call those entrepreneurs who exploit innovations and technology and having the ambition to reach out globally, technopreneurs.
- The advent of steam engine and its applications in the railways and automobiles for example had extended the reach of people, transforming man's history and way of life forever. Similarly, the discovery of electricity had been responsible for much of the world's progress till today. There were less dramatic innovations that nonetheless changed people's lives. But the inventions and discoveries would be for naught if they remained in academic papers on library shelves or hidden as prototypes in the laboratory.
- It is through the technopreneurial exploitation of these inventions and discoveries in the commercial realm that made the great difference for the people of the world and for the technopreneurs themselves. Many people know of Thomas Edison as a great inventor. He was no less a technopreneur to be able to identify the opportunities that his invention could bring, and the risk he undertook to commercialise the light bulb.
- So far, we have been relying on transferring technologies to build up our economy. As our costs go up, and more competitors join in the fray for foreign investments, we will have to be able to create knowledge and new technology, and exploit them innovatively and enterprisingly. The world's biggest economy today, the United States, has its roots of success traced to entrepreneurialism. It is the land of opportunities where entrepreneurship is the path to prosperity.
- Silicon Valley is in San Francisco, or "old gold mountain" in Chinese. It has remained a "gold mountain" after the gold rush and may have lost some of its sparkle after the Internet bust. Still, it is a place of opportunities that are constantly being created by the continued inflow of people seeking more gold. But not all entrepreneurs are driven by greed. People have attributed the success of Silicon Valley to the spirit of chutzpah - the sense that everything is possible and all you need is to try. As part of the TIP course, you spent 6 weeks in Seattle - home of Starbucks and the origin of Microsoft. You must have experienced first-hand the pulsating and hot-blooded belief of entrepreneurs that the only limits lie in their imagination. Presently, small and young companies create two thirds of the net new jobs in the American economy, and they employ half of all private-sector workers.
- In our increasingly globalised world, change is unstoppable, causing fear and resistance in some people. To an entrepreneur however, change can be a precious opportunity for success! Many disruptive innovations that made products and services obsolete also created at the same time, new worlds and markets and increased efficiencies. The telephone replaced the telegram. Mainframe computers were supplanted by minicomputers which were in turn made obsolete by personal computers. Companies not able to respond to these changes were relegated to oblivion. They affected not just companies, but nations too.
- We need to be able to keep up with these changes, or we too could fall by the wayside. We must not be afraid to re-examine current practices, even successful ones. Hence the Economic Review Committee had spared no effort to "leave no stone unturned". One of the major issues examined was entrepreneurship in Singapore. We recognise that Singapore needs people who are enterprising and with an entrepreneurial mindset. The spirit of enterprise needs to be kindled - to recognise changes as possibilities, identify valuable opportunities and take risks to succeed. We have changed our rules and regulations to be supportive of and the environment conducive for entrepreneurial undertaking.
- Entrepreneurship is not limited to just starting a company. It could be applied to big and established companies as well. Companies like Microsoft and 3M have been widely touted as entrepreneurial. These companies constantly re-invent themselves to meet tough challenges and demanding changes.
- I am confident that amongst us here today we have many technopreneurs in the making - with grit, passion and vision to conquer all odds to emerge as winners. There have been many well-known entrepreneurs in our history. Tan Kah Kee, Lee Kong Chian, Tan Lark Sye are some of the examples. Being second or third generation of immigrants, we should still have the entrepreneurial spirit in our blood.
- Universities could be the hotbed to rekindle this entrepreneurial spirit. It has been reported that MIT alumni and faculty, for example, have been responsible for over 4000 enterprises worldwide that generated a revenue equivalent to a GDP larger than our own. NTU has also done well in its efforts to spin off companies. With its initial grant of S$1m from the former NSTB, it has now about 20 companies, such as DenseLight Semiconductors Pte Ltd and Nanofilm Technologies which have shown great potential and innovation. The founders of these two enterprises were NTU faculty members who decided to take the plunge to prove that their research was not just academic pursuit but would have great economic value. They serve as good examples of the fledgling entrepreneurial spirit in our universities.
- But are these exceptions and how entrepreneurial are Singaporeans? According to the 2001 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) report, only 5.2% of Singaporeans were involved in a business start-up in the last 18 months prior to the survey. Perhaps, our economic success has innocently engendered a level of comfort and preference for secure jobs on familiar ground.
- However, this could be changing. There are individuals who exemplify the entrepreneurial spirit. Sim Wong Hoo is quite a well-known technopreneur. But there are others who are now emerging, the likes of Olivia Lum of Hyflux, Ron Sim of Osim, Leslie Loh of System Access, Richard Lai of Dollar Dex, Ong Peng Tsin of Interwoven and Jeffrey Goh of Litespeed who will be addressing you later. In a recent Straits Times survey conducted of Singaporeans aged 15-35 years, 42% indicated an interest in running their business. This year's GEM survey, found that Singapore's entrepreneurial activity ranking improved from 27th out of 29 nations to 21st out of 29 nations.
- As we push for a more entrepreneurial Singapore, we must not forget the foundations and values that have led to where we are today. We have been known to be a place where we could get things done, where things work efficiently and flawlessly. This is the reason that many big companies come to Singapore, providing us jobs and opportunities. In fact, there are now 6000 MNCs in Singapore. If we can leverage on them more, they would become a market for many innovations, multiplying manifold the domestic market that our physical size may suggest.
- Are we able to still be the place where things run like clockwork and at the same time, with sufficient space for experimentation and trial? Can we be the place that is most efficient and most perfect, and yet the most open to ideas and tolerant of failure? It is a seeming contradiction that we will have to manage. To me, they are two sides of the same coin that we have to do well at different stage of the value chain. We want to create the space to enable technopreneurs to look for problems and opportunities and for these ideas to be experimented at a test bed, accepting whatever failures and rectifications that will come along with the experimentation, and at the implementation stage, for our operational system to be perfect with zero defects. We are good in doing the latter. We now have to be good in doing the former.
- Thanks to NTU's foresight, we have the privilege of the first graduate diploma programme on technopreneurship and innovation ever conducted in the Asia Pacific. May I congratulate the University for the successful launch and completion of TIP. Most of all, congratulations to our first cohort of graduates. You can make a difference in moving Singapore into a more entrepreneurial economy and increasingly onto the world stage of innovation. I wish you all great success in your future technopreneurial undertaking.
Thank you.
|
|  |
|
