Singapore's recommendations to foster innovation and competitiveness

Singapore, 25 June 2007 – Sharing Singapore’s recipe for always being ranked highly for competitiveness, Lim Siong-Guan, Chairman, Singapore Economic Development Board, recommended a heavy dose of "LSD" or "Lead, Speed and Differentiation" to encourage innovation in Asia. He said his country’s desire to always stay in the "lead" lends a sense of urgency to its people to innovate. Speed, through government agencies working in partnership to meet the needs of businesses, helps shorten the lead time for companies, he added. And differentiation, through identifying niche areas where few are staking their claim, helps sustain a country’s competitive advantage, he explained.

Lim was speaking at a session entitled "The Innovation Mantra: The Key to Asian Competitiveness?" on the second day of the World Economic Forum on East Asia in Singapore.

Borrowing from the Singapore experience, Lim stressed that these three aspects must be supported by other factors such as trust, through laws protecting intellectual property rights (IPR), and building knowledge, by promoting research in companies and universities.

Supporting Lim’s point on the close research partnership between universities and industry, Kiyoshi Kurokawa, Science Adviser to the Prime Minister, said innovation clusters – pointing to the example of Silicon Valley and the MIT campus – are very important sources of new ideas. But more important is the ability to commercialize these ideas and deliver products and services to the market. Chiming in, Jim Goodnight, CEO of SAS, USA, added that innovation clusters are becoming a trend in the US with companies building research and development facilities adjacent to campuses. He also stressed the importance of government policies in promoting and restricting innovation. "In the US we have an R&D tax credit that gives us extra money. If we increase our R&D activities, we get a credit that helps to stimulate us to put more money into research. Government polices can be restrictive and prevent innovation. One example is Europe. Pharmaceutical companies are no longer interested in producing new drugs in Europe, so they have moved their clinical trials and related activities to other countries such as India."

Lamon Rutten, Joint Managing Director, Multi Commodity Exchange of India, said for innovation to flourish, there has to be room for serendipity. "You must provide space for coincidental innovation. Asia is very well placed for disruptive innovation and that will give Asia a global competitiveness. Many in Asia live on less than two dollars a day, and to reach those people, you have to be very innovative."

Addressing the poor track record of IPR protection in some Asian countries as a stumbling block to innovation, Liu Jiren, Chairman and CEO, Neusoft, People's Republic of China, agreed that while software piracy is still a problem in China, he believed the country is making strides on the issue. Citing his company’s experience as an example, he said the reduction in piracy in China has enabled his software company to command greater market share than when he first started in 1991.

Speaking on IPR protection in India, K. V. Kamath, Managing Director and CEO, ICICI Bank, India, said the situation has been the same in his country. He noted that there has been greater awareness of IPR through education but pointed out that the ultimate solution lies with technology itself. "An Indian company recently bought a library of some 10,000 Indian movies and started selling them at less than a dollar each. That has removed the need for consumers to buy pirated movies."

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