Singapore’s Accreditation@IDA: skip it if you’re a startup

Derrick is the first employee at Kicksend, a Y Combinator-backed startup based in Silicon Valley.

Last month, the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) launched Accreditation@IDA, a scheme designed to “accredit promising and innovative Singapore-based technology product start-ups to establish credentials and position them as qualified contenders to enterprise buyers, including the Singapore Government”.

A Closer Look

While Accreditation@IDA certainly sounds promising in theory, I am skeptical about its effectiveness. As seen in its terms and guidelines:

Objectives

We set up the Accreditation@IDA to help startups win real projects from government and industry buyers, where accredited companies will be considered first for various innovation-focused government projects and industry collaborations.

[The initiative aims to] build an innovative technopreneur ecosystem to drive economic growth, inspire the younger generation, and build more innovative products and technology companies that can scale overseas.

Requirements

The company must have:

• an innovative enterprise product, with focus on software
• a financing and/or fund raising plan going forward to sustainably operate
• the capabilities and resources to support its business plan
• a sizeable addressable demand for the product to support its business plan
• strong management team with established track records and low key-man risks

Evaluation

The parameters evaluated are benchmarked using Industry testing best practices such as TMMI and ISO/IEC 25010 standards for Systems and software Quality Requirements and Evaluation (SQuaRE) and includes the functional, reliability, performance, portability, compatibility, security, usability and maintainability of the product. IDA may also require access to the source codes of the product and the company’s staging servers for penetration tests in the event IDA deems that security testing is necessary.

The company shall keep the version of the product that is accredited available for sale in the enterprise market throughout the validity of the accreditation status.

Nope.

What can be improved?