Why Singaporean organisations struggle to innovate

It can be argued that Singapore has been one of the most innovative nations in the world. To reach first world status well before its 50^th anniversary as a nation, to be described as a model for governance processes, and to be a world leader on so many fronts without having a plethora of natural resources is an amazing feat by any standards.

Yet I also find many people lamenting that Singaporean companies have lost their ability to innovate. That Singaporeans do not come across as adaptive and innovative individuals. The Government has responded, and has created many resources and grants to support entrepreneurship and innovation in Singapore.

However, I wonder if creating all these resources will solve the problem. In my view, Singapore actually needs to solve its ‘problem of plenty’.

1.       Extra resource increases the fear of failure: Once a lot of resources are deployed, people are terrified of failing. This fear actually stymies innovation, as people begin to check and recheck assumptions, versus prototyping their ideas and launching.

A successful serial entrepreneur from Singapore tells me he looks to his team to fail fast, versus take a lot more time to build a working solution. His view is that all innovative ideas are based on assumptions, many of them untested.

He limits the resources he makes available, so they are not paralyzed at the prospect of failing. He then augments their budgets and manpower once they have replaced assumptions with real information gleaned from their early efforts.

2.       The focus shifts from securing innovative wins to securing more resources: Quite simply, the focus on resources sometimes shifts the discussion on one about means, not the ends. In one organisation (a real story), more than 8 weeks were consumed in putting up the case for the annual budget, including rationale to seek additional funds in the coming year. Discussions with the finance team were spirited.

Yet for the last three years, each year the team would be scrambling to accrue unspent dollars at the end of the year, using all sorts of creative logic to justify taking some of the money forward. The effort to secure the resource was displacing the effort to deploy and use. And therein halted the innovation.

3.       Resources bring with them additional bureaucracy and processes: I recently read that the typical iPhone today has more computing power than the computers that put man on the moon! Yet I would be surprised if anyone who is part of such a mission does not seek more computing power than all the huge machines at their disposal.

All the extra people and processes add more questions to the problem being attempted versus contribute more solutions. In Singapore all the additional public resources augmenting organisational ones mean that there is a natural tendency to over-resource, which will need to be watched.

Many of the most innovative disruptions today such as airBNB come from individuals and organisations that struggled to even find resources to survive. In the modern age we are now back to the era of small, even desperate, armies winning big against big, well equipped, but bureaucratic opponents.

The next time you have a chance to obtain additional budgets, get more people, or secure more resources, do think about the bare minimum you can survive with, and make the magic happen.