Singapore should nurture entrepreneurship by creating customers, not jobs

Five years ago, Guy Kawasaki, a Silicon Valley tech evangelist famously said, “Singapore has five million people, six entrepreneurs and one opinion.” As opposed to Israel having five million people, six million entrepreneurs and 15 million opinions.
Five years on, according to a recent article in Tech In Asia, Singapore is ranked #10 in best startup ecosystems in the world and needless to say, we have a more vibrant startup community, from e-commerce to deep technology companies in Medtech.
In a recent interview, Kawasaki, still feels that more can be done to nurture entrepreneurship in Singapore and the key to that is in changing the focus from job creation to customer creation. “The goal of entrepreneurship is to create customers, not jobs. Companies create customers out of people who were using a competitive product or who were not in the market at all,” he said.
He also opined that while Singapore government has been very proactive in building the necessary entrepreneurial infrastructure; it cannot lead, inspire and nurture startups.
The trick he says is in creating our own model – one which Silicon Valley would want to copy. We can bid goodbye to the age old networks that have come out of Silicon Valley – time to create our own.