Entrepreneurial politics

We recently organized a panel at Insead Business School in Singapore to talk about the topic of Entrepreneurship in Singapore. My interest in organizing this came from what I've been learning about the development of Singapore in the last years. I was surprised to see how politicians in Singapore were defining very specific objectives for the country in terms of how they want to compete internationally; which areas of the economy they wanted to develop; how to attract talent;.. This is what I tagged as "entrepreneurial politics". Know where you want to go, what you want to do to transform a country and then, actually doing it.

Amongst the attendees to the event, we had Lee Yi Shyan, Minister of State for Trade and Industry with special responsibility for Entrepreneurship. The first thing that one notices is that there is a Minister with a responsibility for entrepreneurship. But then, it was fascinating to listen to him describe how they plan to develop Singapore into an entrepreneurial hub in the following years. Advantages go from providing visas to entrepreneurs without a job so they have time to launch their ventures, to equity funding that matches other private funding you may already have, to tax preferential conditions. But in addition, they are creating the culture of entrepreneurship by promoting the spirit of innovation, experimentation and risk taking.

This is a fascinating exercise that they are doing. We'll see in the following years how it evolves. One would only think of two important considerations. Singapore is in itself a small market for any venture, so by definition companies need to be global. And, the stock market is still small and this needs development in order to attract more companies to be established in Singapore.