Workers’ Party MP Sylvia Lim (Aljunied GRC) made the case in Parliament for encouraging more innovation and creativity in Singapore, which would allow the country to contribute more to humankind.
The WP Chair said in Parliament on Tuesday that while Singapore’s rule-keeping culture has served it well in keeping the number of serious cases and deaths low during the Covid-19 pandemic, when it comes to innovation, other countries with “looser” cultures have done better.
The country would, therefore, do well to find a balance between “tightness and looseness”, she argued, citing an analysis published in 2021 in the medical journal The Lancet on “tight” and “loose” cultures.
Along with China, Singapore is considered to be a “tight” culture whose citizens are highly respectful of rules and norms. “Contrast these with countries such as the United States,” she said, “where people tended to defy them.”
While “tight” countries fared well during the pandemic with lower numbers of serious illness and deaths, some of the “loosest” countries that fared poorly in managing the pandemic, “were the most innovative and dynamic in developing, procuring, and distributing the vaccine,” Ms Lim said quoting political commentator and CNN host Fareed Zakaria.
“He concluded that these loose countries benefited from the creativity, risk-taking and rule-breaking that was endemic in their people. Today, it is clear how these solutions have benefited humanity across the globe,” she added.
She did note, however, that Singapore has made a number of contributions to solutions to the pandemic, such as the neutralising antibody test kit developed by researchers at Duke-NUS and the Covid-19 test kit that needs no reagents to process samples.
But Ms Lim added that while the Duke-NUS antibody test kit had received approval from the US Food and Drug Administration, it has not been approved by Singapore’s Health Sciences Authority for public use.
Ms Lim said: “A lack of locally manufactured solutions is not just a matter of national pride. We have experienced first-hand how, in a global pandemic, needing to procure supplies from abroad subjects us to market forces and has resulted in supply shortages.”
“We should strive to move up the value chain to be owners of such intellectual property,” she said, before asking, “what is the state of Singapore’s capacity to innovate?”
Ms Lim said that Singapore is “somewhat lagging” in the area of innovation and creativity, in comparison with countries such as South Korea, citing last year’s Global Innovation Index.
On the index, Singapore is ranked 8th globally and has been in the top ten for more than a decade, primarily due to institutions and market and business sophistication. However, when it comes to creative outputs and and technology outputs, it lags behind countries such as South Korea.
“Do we need to do more to nurture creativity and risk-taking? Are there other inhibitors in Singapore’s ecosystem that need to be addressed? These need constant review,” the WP chair said.
Ms Lim’s speech may be viewed in full here.
/TISG