The confusing state of Singapore government's funding schemes

I must admit, government agencies are the least customer centric organisations one can find. This is manifested very clearly in the way we offer our funding schemes, in a maze-like structure for companies to navigate. This is insane. Imagine if you are a company and your customers can't find your products, how acceptable will that be?

The top issue is one, ironcally, that the web would have solve: search. There are so many funding schemes from various agencies that a company will not know where to start. Pages are not optimised for search engines so they don't show up in google searches. Even when there is an attempt to provide a one stop listing, the information is so minimal and incomplete that it is next to useless.

Let's look at one of those attempts at listing all the relevant funding schemes:
















The first thing that jumped out at me was that the funding scheme was organised by agencies, with very little information on the details of the scheme such as description, funding scope, crtieria, grant amount etc. This is again a reflection of the non-customer centric attitude of the agencies.

What I would like to see is a startup that organises such information for the rest of the community. I have given up any hope that the changes will come from within the agencies. We need a startup to create a pull system that lets companies key in what they need, which sectors they are from etc and then recommend the right schemes to them. If that is too much work, even a comparison engine with the options to filter schemes by criteria, grant amount, grant type, sectors etc will be much more useful.

Anybody wants to take a crack at it?

Posted in: Personal,Singapore startup environment