Singapore has the ideal environment for developing smart city innovations

Iswaran delivers a speech as guest-of-honour at the first Huawei Innovation Day Asia.

S Iswaran, Singapore's Minister for Trade & Industry, has emphasised that Singapore is an ideal test bed for smart city innovations, and is open to collaborations that result in smart city-related innovations.

In a welcome address at the inaugural Huawei Innovation Day Asia in Singapore he said: "Addressing clear and present needs in the market is a key impetus for innovation. That is how Singapore has developed niche capabilities and built a strong track record in certain sectors such as urban services and water. One sector which offers future opportunities is smart cities solutions," he said.

According to Iswaran, Singapore has a good track record in developing smart cities solutions, and is ideal as a 'living lab' for testing them. He noted that government expenditure in R&D has risen eight-fold from S$2 billion in the first half of the 1990s, to S$16 billion in the first half of the current decade. The number of research scientists and engineers in Singapore has also grown from 5,000 in 1991 to 32,000 in 2013.

"As a small city-state, Singapore has had to develop innovative solutions to overcome acute resource constraints, such as land scarcity and the lack of natural resources. For instance, in 1998, Singapore developed the Electronic Road Pricing (ERP) system to ease road congestion by influencing drivers’ road usage patterns. Several major cities, including London and Stockholm, have studied Singapore’s ERP system to address urban congestion," he pointed out, inviting commercial companies to partner public agencies in developing, testing and commercialising smart cities solutions.

Energy and public utilities companies such as EDF* and Veolia have already established Centres of Excellence in Singapore, and are working with the Singapore Housing Development Board to develop a 3D modelling tool to visualise and test building plans virtually, he disclosed. Another smart city application comes from home-grown ST Electronics, which developed an intelligent water management system that remotely monitors and analyses data from the national water infrastructure in real-time, so that the Public Utilities Board can respond quickly to incidents that might affect water supply.

Singapore is also ensuring that the wider ecosystem is available to support smart city efforts. "New capabilities and skill-sets will be required to support the development of industry that creates solutions for smart, or smarter, cities," he said. "Data analytics has been identified as one such important capability. Hence, the government has been actively partnering companies, universities and research institutions to train Singaporeans in data analytics, with the aim of nurturing a pool of 2,500 multidisciplinary analytics professionals by 2017."

Singapore has also invested in research to support the development of smart cities solutions, he added.

"The need for smart cities solutions in Asia provides exciting opportunities for our people and businesses. I am confident that Singapore can play a meaningful and valuable role in that regard, through collaborations and partnerships between the industry, research community and public agencies, to develop innovative solutions that address the growing needs and challenges of cities in Asia," he concluded.

Interested?
Read the TechTrade Asia blog post about the smart cities discussion at Huawei Innovation Day Asia

Read the TechTrade Asia blog post about Huawei's vision for a digital and connected future

*Electricité de France, or EDF, is a French energy company, and a leading producer of electricity.