Why are local startups not interested in R&D

We have now supported a couple of international research centres that are doing interested things in digital and social media. Most of these R&D will be made available for startups to exploit and commercialise. Thing is, I have not seen any interest from the startup community at all.

R&D is interesting to me because they are solving very hard problems. Problems that startups might not have the resources or capabilities to solve. The resulting solutions might unlock value that startups can capitalise on.

Let's look at one concrete example. There has been talks about Twitter being a real time search engine. However, real time search is tough, especially if you think of non text data streams such as live video streams provided by 12seconds.

One of the labs we are forming is a combination of TsingHua University from China and NUS from Singapore. The problem they are set up to crack is doing search in real time, multi-sensory data. To me, this is exciting research. What solutions they create can have lots of business implications.

I think that going forward, we need to reduce the transaction costs that make it easier for startups to start thinking of leveraging on the R&D we are funding.

Posted in: Singapore startup environment