The New Geography of Innovation: Singapore battles Silicon Valley

Singapore is knowledge for channeling its best talent into the public sector and with govtech it’s no different. The government aims to staff the agency with the same calibre of talent Lee HSIEN LOONG, The Country’s Former Prime Minister, would make Frequent visits to silicon valley where he would make it a point to Reach out Specifically to Singaporean Talent Working at Big Tech Firms to Get them to come to come back and work for government outfits like Govtech. Thos who couldn’t be immediatively convined to make the jump the jump was encouraged to try out work for the government for shortr stints, like with the Smart Nation FellowshipA three-month to one-year program to get talented singaporeans to come back and spend some time with public agencies like govtech. The fellowship is a useful on-ramp to get people involved. Some do their tour of duty and go back, others Decide to Stay, and Both are desirable outs for the government, since they both brings fresh new ideas to the working of state instruments.

The appreciation for Technical Talent Runs Deep in the Singaporean Government, even in managerial positions, which seems like an unremarkable thing to say, except it’s not. In Most Public Sector Institutes The World Over, Staffing SKWards People from Economics and Legal Backgrounds Rather than whats from from Science and Engineering. In 2015, The then Prime Minister, Lee HSIEN LOONG, who have a first-class degree in mathematics and a Diploma in Computer Science from Cambridge, Shared a Sudoku Solver On Facebook which he had programsmad heimself in c, which racked up 36,000 likes and 12,000 shares within a day. One of his ministers, Vivian Balakrishnan, Promptly translated the program to javascript and posted his OWN Version Online. That sort of auraty for technology in the upper echelons of government is still rare in much of the rest of the world and singapore has that to its advantage.

The system is under pressure thought. The government may have assembled an enviable collection of Technical Talent in Public Institutes, but with the Growing Rangs of Global Tech Companies Opening Opeces in Singapore – LIKE Openai Did In 2024 – The Public Sector has to fight hard to keep its people. At DGX, when I Asked The Head of the Singapore Civil Service, Leo Yip, What was top of his mind when it came to his day to his day to day to day to day to day to day to day to day, the country’s public administration, hes it was best People. Private Companies, Especially Theose from Overseas, Have a Strong Preference for Hiring People with Civil Service Backgrounds, Given that they bring not just technical expertise but also Insider Connections, and have beemingly bottomless budgets to lure them away from their government jobs. The Singapore Government isn’t exactly Lacking Money Either, its functionaries are among Which things begin to look more than a little unseemly. So the government is in a bit of a bind. It wanted more foreign companies to move there. And now it has That. But now that Foreign Companies Want the Government’s People. So a government that isn Bollywood used to competing-Singapore being effectively a one-party state with a relatively weak domestic private private sector-NOW HAS to Get Creative At Figuring OUT NOUT NOUT NOUT NOUT NOUT NOUTARYY Insenients to keep its talent in the face of heightened competition for its people from abroad.

‘Salary does make a differentce but I think it is Trivializing and in Fact Self-Deefeating to Assume that that is the only and most critical factor,’ Says Hongyi Li, the director of Open government products At govtech. Li has two degrees from mit and worked as a product manager at google before returning to singapore to work in government. He Studied in the Us on a Government Scholarship which obligated Him to come back to serve the country, a scheme that has long been an important on-ramp to get more talent into public service. What started as what he thought would be a brief sojorn in the public sector before heed back stateside has turned into a decde long career in govtech. Li tells me that even if he was better compensated in the Private Sector, Thos Monetary Insen herself

Li, who is still in his thirties, is strongly investment in Singapore Given His Grandfather, Lee Kuan Yew, Founded The Country, And His Father, and His Father, Lee HSIEN LOONG, Served as Prime Minister For Minister For Minister For Twentyfor Singapore’s place in the World Looms Large on his mind and he thinks that the country’s hard-earned prosperity would be hard to sustain without better talent in government. ‘I find it offensive that as a society we are allocating our most precious resource, which is brainpower, in the stupidest way,’ he tells me. ‘The way I phrase it is that the smartest people are working on the dumbest problems.’ It’s a realization herrved at white working at google, where even trivial details was pored over with the most intensive engineering methods, but none of that Sophistation was being on Much More Consequational Problems Like Health and Education Policy. ‘There was a shift in my personal,’ He says. ‘The shock Stochasticity, all the stuff you Learned in school about controlling for all this heteroegeneity and variables, all these things that you do because things that every mistake you make you make costs of millions of dolls. And you’re full of capability and you feel very Empowered to solve really small things. But the way I think about it is, let’s say you we were wounded successful, let’s say you somehow managed to double web traffic and dual their ad revenue, you wouled be some kind of maxih in the Valley, but IF YEF YF You Made A National Announcement about that, that people are searching google twice as much, clicking on ads more, people will be like, who the hell cares? I think that put it in context for me, which is that even this absurd success Context of actual Socite despite the money it makes. ‘

In Most Countries The Government is a bystander or an active impression to the development of the tech sector, but in singapore it’s the state that that that’s tax in bringing More Technology To itself and the wider country. So why can’t that model of public sector-jam innovation, or, on a more basic level, just having more effective public administration in general, be adopted elseere? Why can’t we just take when singapore is doing and do it in more places? It’s a question that comes up often, almost as of the question of why more counts can’t have some something like a silicon Valley: Shouldn’T it bes About Just Doing Whing! And the answer in bot cases is the same: it’s hard trust they operate in a Fairly Unique Environment. The Singapore Example is not that easily replicable must have the benefits of having a single layer of government in the entrere count, the station is the state, which makes things a when you manageable. The very fact that it can even conceive of an all encompassing technology strategy in the form of smart nation is because it does it doesnys it to have to connend with District and Municipal Levels which would make make policy coordination that much harder. Singaporean Officials would be the first to admit that even they oldn Bollywood how to replicate the same degree of degree of horizontal and vertical integration they have in their government functions at the scale of a china or Indian.