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Keynote Address by Singaproe Deputy Prime Minister Dr Tony Tan at the Gala Dinner, 5th HUGO Pacific Meeting Date: 17/11/2004 |
| Deputy Prime Minister Dr Tony Tan delivering his address at the Gala Dinner It is a great pleasure for me to be here this evening to deliver the Keynote Address at the 5th HUGO Pacific Meeting and the 6th Asian-Pacific Conference on Human Genetics.The hosting of the HUGO PACIFIC meeting here is a significant milestone in our efforts to grow Singapore into a premier biomedical sciences hub. The topic of my speech this evening is the importance of Research and Development to a country's economic progress.Let me begin by briefly sketching Singapore's economic development over the last forty years. Singapore's Economic Development Singapore is a small country. We have a population of just over 4 million people, and no natural resources other than a strategic location. We are a very young nation, barely 40 years old. Notwithstanding these handicaps, Singapore has come a long way since our independence in 1965. When we embarked on our industrialization program in the 1960s, we started out with labor intensive industries. Our investment promotion efforts were targeted at labor and skill-intensive industries such as machine tools and electronic meters. As these industries needed workers who were literate and skilled in working machines, we focused on raising our standards of education, upgrading the skills of our people and increasing the number and quality of engineers, technicians and managers to support the industries. With good infrastructure, stable investment climate and political stability, and a disciplined and hardworking workforce, we attracted companies to invest and operate in Singapore. In the early days, these were low value-added industries but they provided growth and employment, and allowed us to establish an economic lead over our neighbours. Other countries soon replicated our formula for economic success. To stay ahead, we moved up the value chain to attract higher value-added investments. These were capital intensive industries such as electronics and chemicals, which required higher skilled workers.In the late 1980s and 1990s, public research institutions were also established to develop economically relevant R&D to support our industries; and to create and grow new industries. Together with the universities, the research institutes also helped to train R&D manpower for the industry. Through incentive frameworks, industry R&D support and a good supply of skilled engineers and science graduates, we continued to be an attractive location for new investments and industries. With our life sciences initiative launched in June 2000, we have moved yet another notch up the value chain. We are now training more post-graduates and post-doctorates for the highly knowledge intensive biomedical and pharmaceutical industries. Talent is the key to economic success in the Twenty-First Century. The global economic landscape has changed dramatically, with the rise of China and India. China has a population of 1.3 billion and is growing strongly at 8 to 10% a year. India has a population of 1 billion and is the second fastest growing Asian economy, at 6 to 8% a year. As the investment environment and workforce quality in these countries improve, they will offer tremendous opportunities for the other countries in the region. At the same time, other countries will have to adjust their own policies and systems to play a complementary role to plug into the growth opportunities present in these two large markets. Singapore understands the imperative to move ahead of the competition and to find new ways to sustain our competitive advantage for the long term. We will need to leverage on our strengths and identify niche areas for ourselves. Singapore will continue to offer excellent infrastructure, stable political and investment climate, efficient government, a strong IP protection regime, and a steady supply of well-educated graduates. However, these assets will not be enough to ensure our progress. We must find sustainable ways to differentiate ourselves, not just based on cost and competence. Instead we must strive to achieve peaks of excellence in selected areas. If we are successful in identifying and playing to our natural advantage, we will be able to maintain our lead for many more years. One critical success factor will be Singapore's ability to become an international talent node, drawing people from all corners of the world to live and work here. Talent is the key to economic success today. All successful global cities are global talent hubs. How to attract talent? We must have a vibrant environment and an open society, which offers opportunities and communities of like-minded creative and talented people. Look at how Boston grew into a talent hub. The concentration of top talent in the universities there has attracted investments and companies into the area. Boston today is a hotspot for biotech and pharmaceutical developments. Many of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies such as Novartis and Merck have located research activities in the area. For instance, Novartis has located its global R&D headquarters in Cambridge because of the proximity to talent and ability to recruit good quality scientists. Indeed, investments and economic growth follow talent. Talent will be the key to success and will form a country's competitive advantage in the twenty-first century. Singapore as a Talent Hub for Top Scientific and Research Talent Although we are a small city-state with just over 4 million people, Singapore possesses special qualities in its people, society and environment that will help it to create a strong base to attract and nurture talented individuals, to offer them opportunities to undertake cutting edge R&D work, and to create new knowledge and ideas that can transform our understanding of the world, and the economic benefits that this will bring in its wake. I am confident that Singapore has the prerequisites to be a global R&D hub. There are three reasons for my confidence. First, Singapore offers indigenous talent with a natural aptitude for science and mathematics. Our students regularly top international competitions in Science and Mathematics. It is one of very few countries in the world where Mathematics is considered a "soft" subject in our schools. Many of our top students gravitate to science and engineering disciplines in universities, where they excel. This natural bent towards the sciences is encouraged by our education system, and provides the foundation for a society that is comfortable with science and technology, and a workforce that is able to adapt quickly to innovations in science and technology. Second, Singapore society is open and cosmopolitan. Scientists and researchers from all over the world find Singapore an easy environment to adapt to, for themselves and their families. It is relatively easy for companies to assemble an international research team to start up their R&D centres here.We have a thriving scientific community, and our research scientists and engineers have freedom to operate, to maximise their potential and exploit their spirit of enterprise. As Singapore hosts a diversity of top international and local talent, it is easy to plug into the network to find good intellectual company and research collaborators. Experience shows that research is a highly networked activity and researchers will be attracted to communities of creative people who can stimulate and challenge them. Singapore has made some progress by creating an attractive environment and high quality facilities, such as the Biopolis to host such talent. It takes time but we are slowly building up a dynamic and vibrant research climate. We are well-positioned to be the R&D gateway to Asia, for companies to make use of Singapore to access the attractive markets in the region. Third, Singapore has an advantage in the enabling environment it has created for R&D. It has strong legal frameworks for research, transparent guidelines for acceptable ethical behaviour in the life sciences, and good patent protection for innovations. In addition, Singapore is able to organise quickly, and focus resources to get things done. There is a close nexus between Government, academia and research institutions, so that ideas get translated to plans, and plans lead to actions expeditiously and effectively. This creates a positive environment for scientists and researchers that is purposeful, organised and supportive of their work. Can a small country like Singapore sustain a high level of scientific and research activity? I believe the answer is Yes. The success of Switzerland, with a population of just over 7 million people, demonstrates that, with the appropriate strategies and concentration of resources, a small country can enjoy sustained economic growth and prosperity over many generations. The Lessons from Switzerland Last week I waso in Switzerland to study the Swiss science and technology system. I was keen to understand how Switzerland has successfully organised itself to achieve strong S&T performance in various sectors, despite its small population. Switzerland has carefully thought through its S&T approach and has refined its system over many years. It has implemented a systematic and organised way of allocating resources for R&D to cover a broad spectrum of research. The Swiss system has managed to achieve a balance of basic research to sustain Switzerland's scientific excellence and highly skilled manpower, targeted programmes to meet strategic objectives, as well as applied R&D to propel its economic growth. Switzerland recognises the importance of investing in S&T to attract talent and build on its scientific excellence, as a way to sustain its economic competitiveness. It has made education, research and technology a priority and is allocating more funds to these areas. Switzerland is also putting increasing emphasis on innovation, which it sees as the key to sustaining its private sector, and creating industries and companies that will ensure Switzerland's prosperity for the next 10 to 20 years. There are three lessons which, in my view, we can learn from Switzerland. First, to sustain meaningful and impactful scientific and research activity, teaching and research, particularly at the tertiary level, has to be of world-class standards. The Swiss achieve this result by establishing:
Through the above establishments, the Swiss have kept their country at the forefront of science and technology with the economical and prudent use of funds and human resources for which the Swiss are well-known and which has enabled Switzerland to continue building on its wealth for several centuries. Second, we need to identify a few key strategic areas with good growth potential where we can concentrate top talent; and build a robust base for scientific and technological excellence. These focused areas will underpin the growth and development of our strategic economic sectors. As a small country, we cannot spread our resources thinly across all areas, but must concentrate on developing peaks of excellence, with the aim of gaining a very strong lead that will be difficult for our competitors to catch up. Within these focused areas of excellence, we should be prepared to fund a broad spectrum of research, ranging from free to directed research, and from basic to application-inspired research. We need to give more emphasis and resources to basic research. For universities in particular, excellence in basic research and education go hand in hand. Top talent is drawn to institutions offering excellent research opportunities, which in turn will bring the quality of teaching to new heights, resulting in excellent student output, and further stimulation in research. Hence, a virtuous cycle is perpetuated. Just as important, investing in basic research will deepen our ability to forecast new trends and developments and identify new areas of economic growth. In Switzerland, we were told by everyone we met - businessmen, industrialists, government officials and academics - that investing in basic research was not a luxury but a necessity to get industry and the private sector to step up R&D activity. Third, we need to encourage more private sector R&D in Singapore. Today, much resources in the form of funding and talent, are concentrated in public sector agencies. We need to improve our structures to invest more resources in the private sector, as companies are better placed to decide which areas of R&D to invest in, and to align R&D investments with economic and commercial opportunities. Today, in Singapore, 61% of national R&D expenditure is private sector R&D. In comparison, in Switzerland, for every dollar that the Swiss Government spends on research, the Swiss private sector spends three dollars on follow-up R&D activity to enhance their companies' competitiveness and to create new products and services. We should study how to better incentivize private sector R&D. This is pertinent even in our economic structure which is dominated by MNCs with their own global R&D agenda and capabilities. An active private sector R&D environment, with a dynamic flow of talented individuals across academia, public research institutions, and industry, will create more opportunities for high calibre scientists and researchers to work in Singapore, which will in turn generate further economic multipliers. Conclusion In the course of the next few months, the Ministerial Committee on Research and Development will study the three lessons we can learn from Switzerland and review fundamentally how we should shape the science and technology direction for Singapore, to bring us into our next phase of growth. We will look at how best to marshal our limited financial and human resources so that we can optimise our talent across the broad continuum of government, public sector, private sector and R&D activities. The goal is to transform Singapore into a talent magnet for scientific excellence, and to draw on this deep well of scientific and technological capability to create sustainable competitive advantage for Singapore's long term economic growth. Let me conclude by congratulating Professor Edison Liu and his committee for their hard work in organising this event. This evening's audience is a testimony to the huge talent pool in Asia and internationally. I wish all participants a fruitful meeting. What is even more important, the competitive edge achieved by building excellence in selected niche areas cannot be easily replicated by other countries. |
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