“As I look at the evolution of Singapore, there was a period from the 1990s to the early 2000s where we were a country of cloners,” said Wee Luen Chia, ServiceNow’s managing director for Asia. “As a relatively new country, we don’t really have to be super innovative or be the first to come up with an idea. Instead, we’ll look at great ideas in education or housing or manufacturing in other areas and do it better at home. That was how we bootstrapped our development as a nation. We cloned what others were doing, but we did it better. ”
Chia, who began her seven-year career in the Singapore government’s information and communications authority, recalled how government leaders often “make study trips” to review overseas businesses, commercial operations, and government methods before shifting their views to Singapore’s industry and policy ecosystem.
The solid foundation has served Singapore well, but as Chia said, it is not enough for Singapore’s very good and prosperous economy to expand its advantage.
“We’re leaders now,” Chia said. “We can no longer afford to accept what others are doing and execute properly. Singapore’s future must be about change.”
Intelligence, diversity, and a counter-cultural change
It’s no secret, of course. Over the past two decades, Singapore’s annual investment in research and development has increased from approximately $ 3.2bn in 2001 to more than $ 9.2bn in 2018. By the end of 2020, the Singapore government has committed no at least $ 25bn for the next five years of R&D, with the majority going to health, sustainability, manufacturing, and the digital economy.
How we change will be even more important, beyond the amount of capital we put in.
Both the public and private sectors recognize change is crucial to Singapore’s future. Those investments appear to be paying dividends.
“We are seeing the fruits of our investment in R&D, not only in key areas like manufacturing,” Chia said, “but also in areas that are less obvious — changes like vertical farms in our vehicle parking or more accurate and less disruptive saliva tests for Covid -19. ”
He added, “how we change will be even more important, beyond the amount of capital we put in.”
A prime example of this is the use of digital technologies such as analytics or AI to improve the speed and scale of change, says digital futurist and innovation strategist Charlie Ang.
Also read: The self-optimizing enterprise
“Cognitive technologies, such as AI, can help us better understand, serve, and meet customer needs,” Ang said. “A more customer-centric, data-driven approach can turn innovation from an art form into a scientific process. The more rigorous and repetitive we make innovation, the faster we can speed up the process and improve the likelihood of success. ”
Another example of focusing on ways of change, according to Chia, is diversity: engaging more diverse, even diverse voices to generate new ideas and opportunities. And that’s where Singapore’s leaders, he said, need to undergo a bigger change in thinking.
“In Singapore’s founding years, we had a core group of highly educated, highly dedicated people whose decisions unilaterally shaped the direction of the country — who worked in that era of uncertainty and risk, ”Chia said. “And as we now become trendsetters, we must discard this concept that ideas or decision-making power should be limited to a small group of people. That’s where diversity and inclusion comes into play.”
Ang agrees. “If you do things a certain way over a long period of time, you’re likely to stop at incremental thinking,” he says. “That’s not good enough when both technologies and business models are disrupting everything we do at an incredible speed. You need more blue skies, big picture thinking and a lot of ingenuity. , strategic, and interdisciplinary collaboration. ”
Chia cited Singapore’s high level of education as an invitation for organizational leaders to canvass more diverse ideas and test them in consistent processes “where the best ideas float. has been scrubbed, refined, and adopted. ” He also cites open-source software as proof that inviting a wider spectrum of ideas from all types of people, rather than limiting change to a select group of elites, leads to the best which are possible results in any system.
“In open-source, there is no central governing body, but there is a trust system where different developers provide checks and balances so that the best ideas can be promoted through rankings, ”said Chia, who headed open-source software firm Red Hat in Southeast Asia before joining ServiceNow. “It’s the same with how we run organizations or even countries.”
Chia acknowledges that this poses major challenges to Singapore’s private and public sector leaders — at least in a national culture that has traditionally promoted respect for authority. “Creating an environment where people are willing to speak Asian culture is especially difficult to do,” he said. “The way we’re moving forward is for leaders to make a commitment to see these ideas, setting an example by how we work with really smart people from diverse backgrounds. We’re no longer just makers. ; we are explorers. ”
Also read: The evolution of change
Mindset of an explorer
While tooling up Web3 or the metaverse may not have immediate application to wider business and society, Chia believes that learning about the new technology is necessary for any significant change. “There’s this feedback loop where you generate use-cases once you understand the technology, then improve the technology based on the results of those use-cases,” he said. “It starts with knowing the technology and exploring what.”
Ang encourages leaders to explore how different families of emerging technologies can interact to create new paradigms and generate new value. “We’re seeing tremendous growth in cognitive technologies like AI, the blockchain computing system, and immersive technologies like VR,” he said. “What matters most is not a technology, but how innovators and creatives can come up with powerful combinations that radically change the way businesses operate, governments function, and consumers consume.”
And as we now become trendsetters, we should discard this concept that ideas or decision -making power should be limited to a small group of people.
But perhaps most important is creating organizations where people feel safe sharing and generating new ideas. “You may not come up with an idea, but you can be responsible for organizing it and improving it, so that it becomes everyone’s idea,” Chia said. “There has to be a sense of responsibility in joint change. And it’s hard to do that. But that’s what good leadership is about: aligning with a common vision, showing that you value diverse voices and creating processes or engagement policies for the best ideas to rise to the top and continue to improve. ”
Perhaps it is fitting that Singapore, according to history and legend, has been rediscovered many times by explorers from Indonesian princes to private British. In each case, the island promises something different to those who encounter it. As the country developed, it prospered.
The constant search for the better is perhaps Singapore’s biggest strength.
“What might be good now may not be in two years, when everyone’s caught up,” Chia said. “That’s the explorer’s way: the journey doesn’t end.”
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