Speech by Mr Lim Chuan Poh, Chairman of A*STAR, at the STO Summit on 31 May 2017, at St. Regis Singapore

Your Excellencies,
Distinguished speakers,
Friends and Colleagues,  
Ladies and Gentlemen,
a very good morning to all of you.

Introduction

It is my pleasure to welcome you to the inaugural Science and Technology Organisations (STO) Summit.

This Summit is the brainchild of Raj and Antti, MD A*STAR and CEO VTT respectively.

The intent is to bring together leading institutions and thought leaders in this unique STO space that bridges academia and industry, to share ideas on how we can best advance open innovation, accelerate societal and economic value creation, and develop our economies.

It is jointly organised by an international committee comprising VTT, NIST, SINTEF, Innovate UK and A*STAR.

Let us express our appreciation to the organising committee for making this event possible.

On behalf of the organising committee and also Singapore, I would like to extend a warm welcome to all the participants to this Summit, especially those who have travelled considerable distances to be here today.

Together, we have 70 participants, from 10 different countries and 43 different organisations, 8 of whom are Chief Executive or Chairmen of their respective organisations.

This is a good start for an inaugural meeting and I hope we can build on this in the years ahead.

Global Backdrop

This STO Summit comes at a pertinent time against the backdrop of an increasingly complex global and economic environment.

Many advanced economies are grappling with sluggish growth, and are constantly in search of new and innovative ways to revitalise their economies.

Science, technology and innovation have always been important drivers of economic progress and societal well-being.
And they will become even more critical going forward both in terms of contributing to and responding to the relentless pace of technological disruption today.

The ability to leverage on technology to innovate and capture value from the process is what will enable countries to stay ahead.

Many have adopted strategic innovation roadmaps to foster linkages with industry, to promote innovation and to boost productivity and growth.

For example, China made “innovation” the cornerstone of its development strategy in its13th Five-Year Plan, seeking to use innovation to accelerate efforts to move Chinese manufacturing up the value-added curve, and reestablish China as a global centre of innovation and technology.

Germany committed 14 billion euros under its High-Tech Strategy to sharpen research towards outcomes and impact;
and Japan’s Fifth Science and Technology Basic Plan aims to make Japan the “most innovation-friendly country in the world”.

Singapore launched our sixth Five-Year plan early last year, known as the Research, Innovation and Enterprise 2020 Plan, or RIE2020 with a commitment of S$19b or around 1% of our GDP for public sector research.

RIE 2020 aims to facilitate closer coordination of research efforts and more integrated strategies across the landscape, to bring greater benefits to both the economy and society.

Role of STOs in a National RIE System

As part of the planning and preparation prior to the launch of the RIE2020 Plan, A*STAR embarked on a series of learning journeys to a selection of small, research-intensive economies, namely Denmark, Finland, Israel, Netherlands, Switzerland, and Sweden.

These are countries that Singapore can better relate to as we studied how they evolved their RIE systems.
We also visited larger economies like Germany, the UK and the USA, but were more selective in the aspects which we studied; and we had the benefit of having also recently visited China, Japan, and South Korea.

Despite the many similarities, there were also distinctive country specific differences among the systems.

There were many interesting findings from the visits, but let me share two key observations.

First, it was great to be able to connect with a group of entities known as STOs, or Research and Technology Organisations, RTOs, as they are called in some parts of the world.

STOs share a similar mission within the context of each country’s Research, Innovation and Enterprise (RIE) system, mainly, to help translate discovery to innovation to impact the economy and society.

STOs are placed in a unique position to bridge the gap between academia and industry, to focus research and innovation efforts towards a particular mission or outcome.

To the extent possible in each location, STOs orchestrate and convene multidisciplinary, multiparty programmes, and foster public-private partnerships to seek to integrate efforts and seamlessly close the gap from research to innovation to enterprise in the entire innovation system.

As all of you recognise in this room, this is more a statement of desire than the usual state of affairs in each location.

There was a 2010 report in the UK by Lord Herman Hauser entitled, “The Current and Future Role of Technology and Innovation Centres in the UK” commissioned by the Department for Business Innovation and Skills to understand how the UK could better translate their scientific leads into leading positions in new industries.

Lord Hauser identified two factors that dominate the chances of success in translating technologies to commercial success, namely the quality of the team and the readiness of the technology.

The Report concentrated on technology readiness after its initial discovery and recommended that the UK government close the gap between universities and industry through a “translational infrastructure” to provide a business-focused capacity and capability that bridges research and technology commercialisation.

He called this infrastructure “Technology and Innovation Centres”, whose role is to help firms innovate and solve innovation problems that are beyond the capabilities of individual firms by providing a “direct focus for collaborations”.

Lord Hauser made reference to other countries that have such entities, including Fraunhofer in Germany and ETRI in South Korea, and proposed that the UK develop a similar setup that eventually became known as the “Catapult Centres”.

Mr Dick Elsy, CEO of the High Value Manufacturing Catapult Centre, one of the most successful centre, is here with us today.

In A*STAR, we welcomed the report as it provided a rather fitting description of the core work of STOs, and use that report as a basis to shape how we engage similar organisations during our visits to the different countries.

Since the learning journeys, each of these countries are further sharpening their effort to accelerate the translation of excellence into impact.

The UK, as we know, has reaffirmed the importance of the Catapult network in a 2014 review.

More significantly, it is in the process of integrating 7 Research Councils, Innovate UK and some functions of the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) under one umbrella body in the hope to achieve greater national-level coordination of RIE efforts, and accelerate the translation of research outputs into impact.

In Sweden, we learned as well that Research Institutes Sweden were being merged and restructured to create a more unified institute sector and stronger innovation partner called RISE.

The conversations from the trips were what triggered us to bring STOs together into such a Summit to share our experiences and perspectives.

The second observation we made, was that many of the small research-intensive economies we visited have large home-grown companies that are also multinational companies – something we termed as domestic MNCs.

These domestic MNCs are both the engines of innovation as well as receptacles of the research and technology outputs in their home countries.

For example, in Sweden, the top 5 domestic MNCs contributed to nearly three quarter of their business expenditure on R&D or BERD in 2014.

In Finland, Nokia alone used to contribute to almost half of BERD in its heyday.

In comparison, it took almost one hundred companies to contribute to 80% of BERD in Singapore in 2015.

Out of these hundred companies, only about 30% were local enterprises, while the rest were MNCs.

This reflects the state of the technology and innovation adsorptive capacity of the enterprises here.

The Singapore government has invested significantly in developing our universi¬ties and public research institutions in order to catalyse private-sector investments.

While public-sector research has grown in intensity and excellence, we still have a lot of work to do in the enterprise sector, especially among the local enterprises.

The MNCs dominate in many R&D-intensive industry clusters, such as electronics, pharma¬ceuticals, and biomedical sciences.

In comparison, local enterprises are still relatively modest in their research investments and capabilities, but we are encouraged by the pick-up in their growth rate in the last five years or so.

Under such circumstance, the role of STO is even more critical to nurture the innovation absorptive capacity of the local enterprises while catalysing the MNCs to expand their activities here.

Singapore’s Open Innovation Strategy

Despite our relatively short history, I think Singapore has done reasonably well in building a thriving environment for research and innovation, putting many key ingredients together, from embracing open talent strategy, to building key infrastructure, providing sustained and stable funding, and creating policies to facilitate and encourage innovation.

Being a small open economy, Singapore has evolved a set of differentiated Open Innovation strategies to engage the different segments of our enterprises, from the MNCs and Large Local Enterprises to Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs) and startups to expand or grow their innovation capacities.

Very early on, Singapore anchored strategic MNC partners through collaboration and Open Innovation, to transfer knowledge and create good jobs locally.

A*STAR engages with our Large Local Enterprises (LLEs), who are both major employers and key customers for SME suppliers and service providers, and help them move up the value-chain to capture greater value from both local and overseas markets through the use of research and technology.

For our SMEs, who generally have more limited resources available for R&D, we provide them with technologies that could be readily licensed or adopted to help them remain competitive.

A*STAR also contributes to a vibrant startup ecosystem in Singapore.

We work with our startups or spinoffs to help them secure follow-on funding through the creation of new products and businesses using A*STAR technology; providing mentorship and networking with industry; and linking them to venture capital partners through our investment network.

Conclusion

To conclude, as we strive in each of our organisations to deliver on our respective missions, I believe that we all share a common goal:

This is to harness our research and innovation investments to create greater value and meaningful outcomes for our society and contribute to the international community.

It is this common goal that brings us together.

As Science and Technology Organizations, we play a unique role to span the innovation value chain from upstream research to translation to meet industry and national needs.

Open innovation is the foundation on which we can harness the different sets of capabilities and talents, and direct them towards impactful outcomes.

I hope that over the next 2 days, our sharing of ideas and discussions will create new synergies to allow us to grow and learn together, and evolve innovative strategies to help us achieve better outcomes for our countries and also together.

On this note, let me wish all of you a fruitful event.

Thank you very much.