Singapore has yet to produce a truly innovative startup. Here’s why.

Photo credit: aotaro.

It is no overstatement to say that, over the past couple of years, Web 2.0, sometimes called the “second .com boom” has changed the world. Major innovations by tech giants like Google, Facebook, Netflix, and Twitter have pushed what was hitherto thought impossible squarely into the realm of reality.

It didn’t take long for Asia to cotton on, and we soon saw the likes of Tencent and the Alibaba Group burst onto the world stage at a scale that rivals even the biggest and best coming out of the Valley.

Singapore and Singaporean entrepreneurs didn’t take long to catch on, either. Realising that the fate of humanity on the whole is inexorably tied to that of technology’s, the government started to, and is still pumping billions of dollars into the technology industry.

Government agencies are proactively releasing public-facing APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), which software developers will be able to use to gain data and provide insights into every nook and cranny of life on this tiny island, from traffic conditions to the quality of air. Local banks are betting big on fintech, the new kid on the block that promises to revolutionise an industry that, to date, still heavily relies on 1970s technology like COBOL.

Singapore yet to produce a truly innovative startup

And yet, despite stellar efforts from entrepreneurs, engineers, financiers, and both private and public institutions, it would be a bald-faced lie to say that Singapore has produced a truly innovative startup.

In my opinion, the closest we have come to doing so is Viki — and, at risk of being accused of xenophobia, it wasn’t started by a born-and-bred Singaporean. And even then, Viki’s business model so closely mirrors Netflix’s that calling it truly innovative is a long shot by any standard.

In fact, many of Singapore’s most well-funded startups are localised version of business models tested and proven on foreign shores. Grab, which has secured a whopping $680m of disclosed funding, is probably the best example of such a startup. Redmart, while providing an undoubtedly excellent service to increasingly time-starved Singaporeans, is simply doing what major supermarkets have been doing in the US and Europe since I was still an undergraduate (circa 2009).

Why so?

A million reasons have been posited for Singapore’s seeming lack of ability to get aboard the boat before it sets sail.

An oft-cited one attempts to explain away Singapore and Singaporeans’ innovative ineptitude as a function of its education system, which has for decades emphasised rote learning at the expense of creative thinking.

Others point to the overwhelmingly Confucian and East Asian cultural fabric, which prioritises staying in line above all else. As the urban saying goes, opinions are like anuses — everybody has one. The truth is, it is paradoxically due to none of the given reasons and all of them at the same time. In order to uncover the whole truth, it is necessary to undertake a study of Singapore’s history that is both broad and deep.

 In a world where survival is utmost, one learns the value of safety.

Beginning from our earliest days as a nation state, Singapore had always been the runt of the litter that for some inexplicable reason, punched way above its weight. Isolated, tiny, and lacking the human and natural resources of our Southeast and, further afoot, East Asian neighbours, life here has been about survival — at any cost.

This was further exacerbated by the country’s invasion by Japan in World War II, our exile from Malaysian Federation in the 1950s, and Konfrantasi in the 1960s. Of course, this is an over-simplified summary of Singapore’s surprisingly deep historical roots, as any historian would tell you — but it serves simply to illustrate the crux of this article.

How Singapore can overcome this