Opinion: For Singapore students to innovate, old mindsets must be broken

Photo credit: digitalpimp.

Recently, a nation’s call was made all across the mainstream media: “Students must be innovators for Singapore to succeed”. In summary, acting education minister for schools Ng Chee Meng envisioned the need for schools to help students “develop the instincts and ability to be value-creators” so that we can hope to groom the next Olivia Lum of Hyflux or Tan Min-Liang of Razor.

To the Singapore tech startup ecosystem, what Minister Ng has highlighted is not new and has always been a major issue raised by various community members over these past few years. VCs and investors highlighted that Singapore-raised entrepreneurs lack creative out-of-the box thinking, have limited depth in their product ideation and the vision to go beyond Singapore. It is no wonder why they comment on the difficulty in investing in Singaporean founders and have sought foreign founders for investments instead.

See also: Can Singapore’s system product unicorns?

Minister Ng has a great vision and I am sure the tech startup community eagerly agrees that it is time to change the education system to suit the changing needs of Singapore. But many barriers and challenges abound, in particular the area of mindsets.

Mindset of failure

In a previous article “I started a business not to manage it, but to engineer it,” to quote Peter Ho, CEO of Hope Technik, “Failure is an expected continuous result for innovation to work. Creation of innovative products starts from a lot of ‘Oops, there we go again’, head-banging and accepting the poor initial results.”

But in this competitive and rat-race mentality that Singaporeans have, being a failure is branded as someone who has no future or a second chance. In fact, entrepreneurs that I advised and mentored get a lot of flak and judgment by their loved ones when they fail in their first venture.

This stems also from their younger years where parents will hurl disappointment upon them when they did not do well in their grades. This is slowly changing though, where Singaporean celebrities came out and shared their stories of poor academic results during the recent PSLE results announcement, to encourage those who have not done well that there is always other opportunities to develop oneself.

Minister Ng also highlighted Google, where employees are encouraged to take risks and feel safe about making mistakes. This is concurred by Singaporean Yew Jin Lim, tech lead manager of Google Now and based in Google HQ USA.

“At Google, we’re reminded to have a healthy disregard for the impossible and to take risks, without fear of repercussions in case of failure. We set ourselves goals we know we can’t reach yet, because we know that by stretching to meet them we can get further than we expected. This might mean that we might make mistakes as part of the creative and innovation process.

This is something that is part of our organizational DNA, our culture. We believe that it’s important to learn and to fail fast, and to have an open feedback loop with our users so we can continually learn and improve.I had the freedom to experiment and figure out the best way to achieve the goal. Google’s culture is not to micro-manage, but to strongly encourage employees to try new ideas, not stifle them. It is easier said than done, but it’s really refreshing and exciting that Googlers are invested in doing the right thing, and this really keeps me smiling everyday as I skip to work.”

See also: Hiring and retaining engineers: Lessons from US

For students, the mindset of failure needs to be nipped in the bud, especially among parents, siblings, and peers. But it will not change overnight. A sociologist I spoke with mentions that Singapore “celebrates successes, but not failures,” and there are no systems or safety nets in place to deal with the psychological effects of failure. Until this cultural issue is dealt with strongly, Singaporean students will tend to fear failure and be risk-averse, and the vision of being innovators dims.

Mindset of educators and the system

Mindset of parents

Conclusion