Call for economic master plan

NuLife SG

Tech startups...

1) Government do not have the tech know how to understand its trend.
Tech is a very intricate industry that only few of those in the industry understand.
Brute force or bold plans alone are not enuf.
Government's econimist will never ever understand.

2) Even if they can paint the nicest pictures, and plan a master plan.
can they do it??? can they implement it???

Being in the tech industry myself, I feel they cannot do it.

The only thing governemnt can do is plan for tech manufacturing sector
where they simple buy equipments and operate them.
Not real tech startups.

Even so, this way, u will forever be following the manufacturing industry.
There is no tech edge.

I have more observations to share,
but im busy now...maybe another time...

oxford mushroom SG

I know something about the biomedical tech industry and here's my two cents' worth:

1. Unite, not divide:
Advances in medicine nowadays require a team effort. It is highly unlikely that a single researcher, however talented, can come with a truly novel and useful solution. Having worked at top research centres in the world, that is the one common feature I have noticed. Yet in Singapore we divide our medical professionals into two clusters, believing that the competition will be good. Unfortunately, with such a small talent base, the result is petty rivalry, an extreme unwillingness to work together, duplication of effort and both clusters ending up with lack of resources. In short, instead of competing with regional giants like South Korea, we end up fighting among ourselves.

2. Bottom up approach, rather than top down:
Wanting quick results, the government has taken a paternalistic, top-down approach. They plough all the money into biopolis, cutting off funding to budding young researchers and instead hire top-gun foreign researchers to produce the quick results they hope to get. They feel the junior scientist who needs a few thousand dollars for his work is not worth supporting because they think the big boys who ask for a few millions are more likely to churn out earth-shaking discoveries and patents.

This is a myopic move. They have alienated the vast majority of 'non-elite' local researchers who feel they have no place in Singapore and so emigrate, which further reduces our talent pool. Penicillin was not discovered by a million-dollar Nobel laureate working in a top-notch research facility. It came about because an observant but not terribly careful researcher studying microbiology forgot to shut his window and allowed a contaminant to grow on his culture plates. Serendipity plays an important role in many research discoveries...a project failure may mean a great success for a different question.

We should encourage all kinds of research by all levels of researchers, instead of putting all our eggs in one basket. Not all the wild ideas of the young scientist will come to anything. There will be alot of chaff but there may be a gem in the midst of the chaff. Instead we spend huge sums of money buying a golden goose in the hope that it will lay another golden egg. If it doesn't, we have no backup plan. This I consider to be our greatest failure.

3. Create a research, not business culture
An enquiring mind is the basic requirement for successful research. Instead our government runs research like a business corporation with excessive emphasis on tangible targets. If your KPI is publication in a high-impact journal, then researchers will only do research in areas that are likely to yield publications. But of what use is a publication to the Singapore economy? There is a lot of talk about securing patents. But how many patents actually translate into products that contribute to our economy?

By over-emphasizing publication targets, we are not encouraging researchers to think creatively, because a really wild idea is less likely to get a publication. It is better to stick to the accepted dogma and look for a small, newer facet of an old idea to ensure publication. We must not forget that when Peyton Rous suggested that viruses can cause cancer, nobody believed him. He got his Nobel prize 3 years before he died. When pathologist Robbin Warren suggested that the bacteria Helicobacter causes peptic ulcers instead of stress, people laughed at him. Everybody knew it was stress that caused ulcers, or so we thought. To prove they were right, his collaborator Barry Marshall drank a culture of the bacteria to give himself peptic ulcer. They won the Nobel Prize this year.

Can you imagine if Warren and Marshall were to apply for a research grant in Singapore to prove such a wild idea? Which funding agency would dare to support them when the chances of a publication was so extremely slim?

I have alot more to say, but this post is long enough..

NuLife SG

Pardon my comments, as i do not have biotech backgrd.
I dunno if u got some typo or misunderstanding from my side...

>1. Unite, not divide:
where do u get this no unity thing from???
I thought this biopolis thing is suppose to encourage
unity and bring several related research together??

>2. Bottom up approach, rather than top down:

I feel the ans to this is yes and no.
becos afterall the local who are in biotech research are few and
by far inexperienced compared to the world.

Also the way how research can be more sucessful
with real world application, it is often those that are
lead by reknown researchers as their experiences
will guide the rest in the right direction.
Otherwise, those locals researchers will be spending much
time/$$ 'finding needles in the sea'.
Thou i do not know abt biotech, this applies to Engineering Tech
research too. (which at least i know abit)

yes, there will always be a few "geniuses" among the locals
researchers wo much experiences.
but these are by far too few???
im sure the garment had better look out for these people,
else it will be like wat u said.

>3. Create a research, not business culture
did u mistype this??
cos subsequently, u seemed to say not to emhapsis
publication persue culture.

Cos in my understanding, normally research is abt publications.
only when it is done with the right direction for biz gains,
this emhapsis of publications will get less.

So by saying 'create a research culture'
it meant to say 'create more publications'?!?!
u got me blur.
pardon my lack of understanding of biotech.

NuLife SG

They are run and lead by techie entrepenuers. not government.
Any government lead company to compete in the commercial world
can NEVER win the competition.
Becos of the lack of real passionate talents who understand
the intricate industry trends, and the type of people they attract.

Creative, innovative peple will never work for GLCs.

NuLife SG

The fact that the government had not done some right things
the past (and now too), made some1 like me reluntant to present
any grand economic/biz plan to them

And so what if i tell them my grand plan, can they can execute it???
i do doubt so.
My believe is commercial biz stuffs, goverment will not be able
to execute them well.

NuLife SG

I feel it is one word: Culture and to a small extend, Cost.

I tried to name countless reasons, but it all ends up in generally as culture.
A simple word that says it all why we are losing in every area.

Why is the culture had become like this is obvious and debatable.
How we can change it is the way forward.

oxford mushroom SG

That's the spin. In fact it has become extremely divisive. They are supposed to be the elite of Singapore research and take precedence over everyone else. Those not in biopolis feel slighted and will not cooperate with those in the elite group. Doctors in the two health clusters compete with each other and so refuse to work with each other. It is easier to collaborate with an overseas researcher than it is with someone in the other cluster. As for biopolis, everyone (not in it) hates them.

Remember during the SARS crisis the government claimed to be able to produce a diagnostic kit within days, which stretched to weeks and months. Where are the thousands of dollars that were supposed to come from this research? The doctors who were treating SARS patients felt they were the heartlanders who took the risk and did the work whilst the elite got the attention. Do you expect good co-operation with the elite?

I am not surprised when nobody wants to work together. It's a replay of the elite versus the heartlanders...

By business culture, I mean the emphasis on the bottomline. In commerce, the bottomline is dollars and cents; whilst in research, the common perception is that it is publications. By focusing on short term goals such as number of publications, we are telling researchers to produce papers rather than adopt innovative lines of inquiry that may not easily get a paper published. Innovation is always risky. Many Nobel prize winners have been considered daft because their ideas were too radical for the time. If a scientist knows that his pay may be cut if he does not have a publication by the end of the year, he will work on something far less risky.

What I mean is, I can easily work on something 'safe' to guarantee a publication but that does not translate into tangible benefit for Singapore or the world at large. But if I work on a totally novel idea, I might lose my funding and even my job. Consider this, the drugs we use to treat many cancers today are essentially no different from what we used 20 years ago, despite the millions of publications in cancer research. (There are few recent novel therapies based on targeted anti-cancer effect but these are expensive and are not available to the vast majority of our patients, unless they are very rich).

This problem is not unique to Singapore. There is a very perceptive article in Fortune magazine that puts my point across much better than I can:

"According to PubMed, the NCI's online database, the cancer research community has published 1.56 million papersthat's right: 1.56 million!largely on this circuitry and its related genes in hundreds of journals over the years. Many of the findings are shared at the 100-plus international congresses, symposiums, and conventions held each year.

Yet somehow, along the way, something important has gotten lost. The search for knowledge has become an end unto itself rather than the means to an end. And the research has become increasingly narrow, so much so that physician-scientists who want to think systemically about cancer or the organism as a wholeor who might have completely new approachesoften can't get funding..."

(THE WAR ON CANCER: Why We're Losing the War on Cancerand How to Win It, Fortune magazine, 22 Mar 2004).

You can read more at this link: http://www.fortune.com/fortune/articles/0,15114,598425,00.html

NuLife SG

phew.... thats a great eye-opener we have to biotech/medicine /general research.

now i understand ur concern.
its like quality vs quatity.
and to the layman such as the government whos providing the funding,
the emphasis had always been on quatity as that is the only term they understand.

hiaz... is that how the world had become???

oxford mushroom SG

Sad but true. This quotation from that Fortune magazine article gave me a good laugh but it is all so true:

Jean-Pierre Issa, a colleague of Zwelling's who studies leukemias, is equally frustrated by the community's mindset. Still, he admits, the system's lure is powerful. "You get a paper where you change one gene ever so slightly and you have a drastic effect of cancer in the mouse, and that paper gets published in Science or Nature, and in your best journals. That makes your reputation. Then you start getting grants based on that," he says. "Open any major journal and 80% of it is mice or drosophila [fruit flies] or nematodes [worms]. When do you get human studies in there?"

diggo SG

The focus seems to be on biotech, life science research and development to boost the economy.

Is there any other inputs from other areas (services, hospitality, tourism, manufacturing, Infor tech etc etc) that can contribute to the economy growth.

If not then it seems we are REALLY putting all our eggs into one basket.

robertteh SG

Oxford Mushroom:
"Sad but true. This quotation from that Fortune magazine article gave me a good laugh but it is all so true:

Jean-Pierre Issa, a colleague of Zwelling's who studies leukemias, is equally frustrated by the community's mindset. Still, he admits, the system's lure is powerful. "You get a paper where you change one gene ever so slightly and you have a drastic effect of cancer in the mouse, and that paper gets published in Science or Nature, and in your best journals. That makes your reputation. Then you start getting grants based on that," he says. "Open any major journal and 80% of it is mice or drosophila [fruit flies] or nematodes [worms]. When do you get human studies in there?"

Many problems have to be overcome in order to achieve a culture of excellence not by circumventing around problems and ending up in academic excellence published in all the journals.

How many times have we structured our manufacturing industry with the intention to up the value chain ?

Just take Creative Technology, Intel or Microsoft's past experiences. Even if they have come up with the best, the technology still gets upgraded by someone better or more creative. Our local CSM tries to go into wafer fab without having the whole technology understood and figured out - who are the talents, how to retain them and how to develop the upstream and downstream to support this kind of manufacturing.

Of course we will fail if economy is not supported by strategies and complete understanding of strategies within each industry.

Now we still hear about our talents and being world's best in this or that. It is too early to say we are the best. Do some more homework and then get the whole team ready and started before ever mentioning the words "world best".

NuLife SG

well, the government had already identified casino aka service industry.
other things are easily done by india and china, so they wont dare to do.

but really, i still see other areas, but some of which government cannot do.
very commercial stuffs

NuLife SG

1) Case: Direction ->requires Talent (to execute) -> requires Culture
Direction cannot be executed well wo the right talents.
Talents can only be produced with the right culture.
And also real talents will want to run their own show
and not work for restrictive and square agents such the government

2) Solution: Culture change + support w minium involvement from governemnt
What we have from governemnt is only the first one : direction.
Culture must change to support it, via the creation/acceptance of talents.
And government shud only provide support, not too involved,
So that real talents can run the show.

Missing piece in equation: only talents can identify the right direction.

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