From cloners to explorers

“Cognitive technologies, like AI, can help us to better sense, serve, and satisfy customer needs,” Ang says. “A more customer-centric, data-driven approach can turn innovation from an art form into a scientific process. The more rigorous and repeatable we make innovation, the more we can accelerate the process and improve the odds of success.”

Another example of focusing on avenues of innovation, according to Chia, is diversity: engaging a greater number of different, even contrasting voices to generate new ideas and opportunities. And that’s where Singapore’s leaders, he says, need to undergo a bigger shift in thinking.

“In Singapore’s foundation years, we had a core group of highly educated, highly committed people whose decisions would unilaterally shape the country’s direction—which worked in that time of uncertainty and risk,” Chia says. “And as we now become trendsetters, we must discard this concept that ideas or decision power should be limited to a small group of people. That’s where diversity and inclusiveness come in.”

Ang agrees. “If you’ve been doing things in a certain way for so long, you tend to get stuck in incremental thinking,” he says. “That’s simply not good enough when both technologies and business models are disrupting everything we do at an incredible speed. You need much more blue-sky, big-picture thinking and a lot of imaginative, strategic, and interdisciplinary collaboration.”

Chia cites Singapore’s high level of education as an invitation for organisational leaders to canvass more diverse ideas and test them with consistent processes “where the best ideas floated are scrubbed, refined, and adopted.” He also points to open-source software as proof that inviting a broader spectrum of ideas from all sorts of people, rather than limiting innovation to a select group of elites, leads to the best possible outcomes in any system.

“With open-source, there’s no central governing body, but there is a system of trust where different developers provide checks and balances so the best ideas get promoted through the ranking,” says Chia, who led open-source software firm Red Hat in Southeast Asia before joining ServiceNow. “It’s the same with how we run organisations or even countries.”

Chia acknowledges that this poses substantial challenges to Singapore’s private and public sector leaders—not least from a national culture that traditionally espouses deference to authority. “Creating that environment where people are ready to speak up in Asian culture is especially tough to do,” he says. “The way we move forward is for leaders to make a commitment to seeing these ideas through, setting an example by how we work with really smart people from diverse backgrounds. We’re no longer just doers; we’re explorers.”