The Brazil-born, Harvard-educated, co-founder of FaceBook has been based in Singapore for over a year and is frequently seen visiting the sights and meeting local entrepreneurs. Eduardo Saverin has been keeping quiet since the launch of ‘The Social Network’, where he was sympathetically portrayed by Andrew Garfield, though he recently invested in a Silicon Valley start-up called Qwiki. When he finally got round to seeing the film, he says, the message for him was that ‘entrepreneurship and creativity, however complicated, difficult or tortured to execute, are perhaps the most important drivers of business today’.

Nothing new there, except in his case, the torture was extreme when he realised he hadn’t fully appreciated what documents he had signed. But he also says, ‘Innovation is blind’, in the sense that ‘love is blind’. He means it doesn’t care who does it, or who has a go. Anyone can join in, even Harvard students having a late-night prank.

Someone who is probably more careful not to make the same mistake, and who also has made Singapore her home, is Deb Henretta who is a long-time American Procter & Gamble staffer and now heads P&G’s Asia-Pacific headquarters in the city. Last year, the company opened a leadership development centre that will train at least 500 regional leaders a year and it has also started to build a new $250 million Singapore Innovation Centre in the Biopolis campus in North Buona Vista.

Unilever, the Dutch company that is P&G’s great rival, goes even further. Its Singapore headquarters, as well as looking after the Asia-Pacific, also runs its Africa, Middle East, Turkey and even its Central and Eastern Europe operations out of Singapore, totalling over US$19 billions worth of business. It is building a new S$60 million facility in the One-North business park.

Like Hong Kong and Shanghai, Singapore owes its wealth and reputation to being an international hub. It started trading in commodities and then expanded to manufactured goods. Today, it trades in services, especially those awkwardly-named things called creativity, knowledge, information and professional services. When I was working with HBO, the US movie channel, we decided to establish our HBO Asia headquarters in Singapore in preference to other cities not because of Singapore’s TV industry or local audiences but because of its position as a cosmopolitan hub with Asia’s highest proportion of foreign talent and companies. We were betting on the infrastructure and on people having the right attitude.

George Lucas, the mastermind of ‘Star Wars’ and ‘Indiana Jones’, had the same idea when he opened his Lucasfilm Singapore studio in 2005. Located at Changi Business Park, it is the only Lucasfilm studio outside California. The America-Singapore link allows the company to maintain a 24-hour a day production schedule.

This international flavour starts at home. Over half of the resident population speak English at home and the number of Singaporeans proficient in two or more languages jumped from 56% ten years ago to 71% in 2010. The National University of Singapore (NUS) describes itself as a ‘global university based in Asia’. Over one-third of NUS students are from outside the country and in the Business School, the proportion rises to over 90%. This is an incentive for potential students, who may want to work in dozens of countries during their career, as they will meet a wide range of fellow students during their study.

Recently, a brash new pack of Infocomm Technology (ICT) companies have moved in. These are not giants like Unilever or IBM but start-ups from all over the world who see Singapore as a good base for business in a flat world.

Horizon Fuel Cell Technologies is almost a model of a modern company. It is high-tech in a green, innovative sort of way. Its business is the development and manufacturing of micro-fuel cells. It has made one of the world’s first commercially-available and cheapest hydrogen-powered power-plants. It is based in Singapore and has a manufacturing base in Shanghai, investors from Europe, America and Singapore, and senior management who held previous jobs in Germany, Hong Kong, China and America. One of its investors is a member of the Piech family and a major stakeholder in Porsche Holdings, Europe’s biggest car company.

The government is eager to attract such companies. In February, it announced plans to set aside S$2.5 billion over the next five years to strengthen tax incentives for new companies. Since 2008, dozens of companies have moved in from countries as diverse as the America, China, Finland and Israel, operating in the fashionable but risky areas of gaming, mobile apps, cloud computing, Web 2.0 and business analytics. They are projected to trigger an estimated $100 million in project spending and employ an estimated 500 development engineers over the next few years.

The presence of so many like-minded companies provides critical mass. Their employees, usually working in small companies, don’t feel so lonely. By their presence, these start-ups inject innovation into other areas. With social media so pervasive they can easily keep in touch with what is happening in America and Europe as well as the rest of China. As Eduardo Saverin no doubt could tell them.

The presence of start-ups help to inject and spawn innovation in a city.

• Agree
• Disagree

  View Results

 Loading ...