Singapore wants more tech startups

The government eyes fuelling private sector innovation.

Bloomberg Technology reported that Singapore’s government will support technology startups by doing business with them rather than having them rely on grants as the city-state pushes ahead with a plan to become a high-tech hub.

The government wants to fuel private-sector innovation, especially among small and medium-sized firms, in a bid to create a digitally integrated economy, Vivian Balakrishnan, the minister in charge of the country’s "Smart Nation" initiative, said in an interview in Singapore on Tuesday.

“We’re going to feed the private sector, not by giving grants, but by buying services,” he said. “It’s a demand-driven model. I don’t believe in a grant or grantocracy.”

Reaching the people who run Asia's businesses is harder than it used to be.

Inboxes are crowded. Attention is short. The executives you most want to reach — the founders, CFOs, and operators who actually move budgets — are the hardest to find through the usual channels. If you're building a company, a category, or a reputation, you already know this.

We've spent twenty years building the room they read. Singapore Business Review is where senior decision makers in Singapore and across Southeast Asia come for business coverage they can't get elsewhere — in print, online, and in person at the summits and roundtables we host across seven markets.

If you have something these readers should know about — a point of view worth publishing, a product worth their attention, an event worth their time — we'd like to hear what you're trying to do.

Book a meeting

| Or download the media kit (PDF)

240,000 senior readers quarterly in print Top 1,700 Singapore companies reached

7 markets across Southeast Asia