More initiatives to jumpstart innovation announced at Techventure 2015

Dr Balakrishnan delivers the opening address at Techventure 2015.

'Start Here!', the Techventure 2015 theme, is very much what the Singapore government hopes companies will do, said Dr Vivian Balakrishnan, Minister for the Environment And Water Resources, and Minister-in-Charge of the Smart Nation Initiative.

In his opening address at the annual Asian tech startup and investor event organised by the National Research Foundation (NRF) Singapore, Dr Balakrishnan said that the government hopes that Singapore will be a startup destination of choice, especially for Asia.

As technological breakthroughs occur, countries have to pivot to adapt. "Smart Nation is about improving the quality of life, creating more opportunities for everyone and building stronger communities in the midst of greater diversity through the intelligent application of technology and knowledge. It's not about technology per se but really about the application of technology in order to make a real difference to real life," he added.

"We can generate solutions to some of our most difficult challenges of the future by adopting an open, consultative, competitive, data-driven, network approach – an open source society based on innovation, not ideology."

"For innovation to occur, there has to be a highly networked ecosystem. There must be continuous interactions across different actors to share knowledge and push back boundaries. It is not just the stock of ideas that matters but how knowledge is distributed throughout the economy. This requires dynamic links across firms, research performers, intermediary institutions and the public sector," added Dr Balakrishnan, before announcing the LUX Photonics Consortium.

"The Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and the National University of Singapore (NUS) and A*STAR are engaged in research to harvest and distribute energy arising from light generation for imaging, lithography, data storage, and sensing, with potential applications in medicine, security and defence. Examples of light technology research include light-integrated electronic circuits found in telecommunications networks, lasers used for surgery and optical fibres used for water quality sensing. Photonics has been hailed as the solution which will likely be the backbone of many devices in the coming decades," he explained.

The consortium includes the NTU and the NUS as founder members, together with DSO National Laboratories, Technolite, STELOP (pronounced as 'S-T-E-LOP'), DenseLight Semiconductors, Coherent Singapore, Finisar Singapore, and II-VI (pronounced as 'two-six') Singapore.

The minister also said Singapore is committed to helping local companies bring their technologies overseas for test-bedding, which in turn helps them to develop smart technologies for cities globally. "I am pleased to share that one of the initiatives that make use of these test-beds is the SG-UK Joint Test-bedding Initiative that will enable small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) from both Singapore and the UK to collaborate on new technologies for sustainable development under the theme of 'Future Cities'," he said.

Under the initiative SMEs will be supported by partner agencies including SPRING Singapore, (Intellectual Property Intermediary (IPI), NRF, JTC, as well as Innovate UK and the British High Commission, in carrying out test-bedding and technology demonstrations in areas such as mobility and urban sustainability in both countries.

"We won't just engage in theoretical experiments...we want you to hack the future city and that hacking space is Singapore," he said.

NRF will also be launching the S$40 million third Early Stage Venture Fund (ESVFIII) to catalyse the establishment of corporate venture funds by large local enterprises (LLEs), Dr Balakrishnan said. The fund will catalyse the growth of innovative technology companies through government co-investments with private sector LLEs.

"This facilitates the development of technology ecosystems, where smaller companies grow around a core of larger companies. It serves as a way for LLEs to remain competitive and renew their technology base by accessing new technologies through the startups they invest in. Investee companies, in turn can leverage the organisational resources of its corporate partner to overcome barriers to commercialisation, and access networks and expertise to go global," he noted.

An open call inviting applications from eligible LLEs is expected in October 2015, with selected corporate venture funds to be awarded by end-March 2016.

While Dr Balakrishnan acknowledged that Singapore is already highly ranked in global innovation indices, he said that there is still room for improvement. "In the next phase of Singapore, we can't just tweak, we can't just value-add, we have to value-create," he said.

Interested?

In its 19th year, Techventure runs from 21 September to 22 September 2015 at the Marina Bay Sands Convention Centre. The event hosts 900 participants from seven countries, comprising more than 160 startups and 50 investors, plus 19 organisations.

Read the TechTrade Asia blog post about trends in startup evolution

Read the ESVF backgrounder

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