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?”

A Blueprint for Entrepreneurial Education

To establish the few ideas which I have in mind, I must first resolve the question that has been debated by many, “Can entrepreneurship be taught?”. (Refer to this thread for more information) Simplifying this into proper policy implementations, this is how I come down to. The philosophy of entrepreneurial education should be educating the student with the various aspects of setting up an enterprise: basic business plan writing and presentation skills, financial knowledge, basic legal understanding (for e.g. employment, business and intellectual property laws) and understanding of the industry. I am very sure that this philosophy is shared by many of my colleagues who are teaching entrepreneurial related skills. We take the cautious view that we don’t want to molly-coddle our students into being entrepreneurs, but merely offer a route which allow our students to build their own enterprises based on their own passions. We also do not want to give too much information, because being an entrepreneur is to find out for yourself how to do it. If we offer everything, there is no entrepreneurship at all on the part of the student. Of course, we should not glorify but make them aware of the dark side of entrepreneurship.

Here are a couple of ideas which I think that it can be implemented:

• Retail Entrepreneurship in Secondary Schools and JCs: We should forget about teaching IP to students. They are suffering from information overload. Instead, we should focus on simple retail entrepreneurship where we teach the students the simple business processes of sales and distribution. If you read carefully on most famous entrepreneurs in the US, they usually started when they are in high school, not doing anything high tech, but just buying and selling things to make money. For example, my alma mater St. Joseph’s Institution has done something along these lines. We can offer students an area to do their retail shops and see whether they can make money through coming out innovative ideas to market and sell their products.

  In this model, if these students have mastered the business process at a younger age, they will have no problems in commercializing high technology products when they reached tertiary education.

• Less reliance on fundraising: My view is that students should learn the art of bootstrapping. Most students gave up because they could not get the money. The correct attitude is to build your product and service and work with clients, then raise funds when you have credibility.
• The Investors Club (not speculators club): A long time ago, NUS Entrepreneurship Society implemented this idea of having an allocated set of funds and invited student teams to tender their business ideas. In return, they awarded a modest sum of money to set up the business. If these students succeeded in making a profit, everyone has a share of the profit. There is virtually no existence of “venture-capital and private equity” student clubs in Singapore. This group of students can engage the venture capitalists and angel investors.
• Mentoring with entrepreneurs: I see a lot of people like to associate big name entrepreneurs. These people are good role-models but they are too busy to mentor younger generation. One should actively engage socially responsible and credible entrepreneurs in small-medium enterprises to do such mentoring. It is much easier to create an ecosystem without relying on the few but the many which are still in the midst of building their enterprise. Perhaps, there should be a tie up with the current education community with the SMEs.

If we are to improve entrepreneurial education, we are not here to generate more entrepreneurs. We are to generate people who can fend for themselves in times of crisis. The face of the global economy is changing and the old mindset of working for a multi-national company is no longer relevant in today’s times. While I advocate that, I also urge a word of caution to young entrepreneurs. In Singapore, unlike Silicon Valley, it is better to work a few years with the corporate world to develop an understanding of the industry and network and then start your own enterprise. The reason is because the culture is different, but of course, some of the students will decide otherwise. Diversity is the way to innovate and create enterprises.

We can only create a cluster of our own identity if we know what we are doing and not mimic what others are doing, even if it takes another ten years.

Acknowledgements: I dedicate this piece to the students of the 14th and 15th NES for their hard work and their success to what they set out to do.

Technocrati Tags:
Business Angels, Venture Capitalists, Investors, Singapore Entrepreneurs, Start-Ups, Business, Singapore, Entrepreneurship, Private Equity, Technopreneurs, Silicon Valley

Comments