It is a win-win outcome, says MOM

A day after Singapore’s Ministry of Manpower (MOM)’s tender for a foreign worker app to be developed for free incited a wave of negative reactions online, it released a statement to Marketing Interactive clarifying its intentions behind the tender.

MOM said it opted for a “collaborative model to achieve win-win outcomes.”

In a nutshell, MOM’s value proposition to developers is that they can gain valuable insights from a design and usability standpoint, and they can also introduce other peripheral features, such as e-commerce and advertorials, to monetise the app.

Additionally, the app will be wholly owned by the developers.

This quid pro quo arrangement basically means that developers should already have the intention of building an app for the foreign worker market and through them, reap revenue. MOM is simply helping them by providing the resources and platform to market and optimise the app.

Here’s the statement by MOM in full:

“This call for partners was conducted half a year ago, in Jan 2017, MOM had called for partners who have existing mobile apps serving foreign workers (FWs) or who wish to develop one to make use of our content and research findings to better target their app at FWs in Singapore. The aim is to complement our existing outreach efforts to help FWs know more about Singapore’s employment laws, social norms as well as FW-related events.

We had opted for a collaborative model to achieve win-win outcomes. MOM will provide the app developer with the insights from our usability study and design-research findings based on a prototype app, allow the use of MOM content and provide support to market the app to the FW community through our various outreach platforms.

Partners would have full flexibility to continue to provide a suite of other services, including retail services, advertorials and promotions, that can be monetised. In addition, the rights, as well as Foreground and Background IP of the mobile app, continue to be owned by the partners, not by MOM.

We have since signed an MOU with two partners in June 2017 who wish to develop the mobile apps. We understand that the mobile apps will be ready by the end of the year. The apps will be named by the two partners who are the owners of the app. These are not exclusive partnership arrangements and we would welcome any other interested parties to contact MOM.”

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The two partners are Aptiv8 and Genytek.

Aptiv8 said that it already has a foreign worker app blueprint called “FWmyApp” and sees a synergy with MOM’s objectives.

David Leong, director of GenyTek, told Marketing Interactive that “as developers, we are always coming up with new products. It is similar to the provision of webmail services that are available for free. We could do it ourselves, but we see great value in partnering MOM to develop this app for workers. The ‘MOM brand’ lends us the credibility needed to produce a good app that workers will want to use.”

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Image Credit: Ministry of Manpower

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Source: e27