Thoughts for Beyond Covid Emerging Industries

I posted the below from a Beyond Covid WG. Think this has greater implications beyond a govt WG, and is applicable to a more general discussion about economic and innovation strategy in Singapore’s economy.

I’ve been mulling about a few questions and thoughts, which I’m sharing below as catalyst/ideas/seeds for further discussion.

  1. Are we potentially filtering out the best ideas with our rigour and scale of thinking?
    Sharing some quotes from Paul Graham and Sam Altman from Y combinator:

    Paul Graham:
    “…the best ideas look initially like bad ideas.***…***The first time Peter Thiel spoke at YC he drew a Venn diagram that illustrates the situation perfectly. He drew two intersecting circles, one labelled “seems like a bad idea” and the other “is a good idea.” The intersection is the sweet spot for startups.

    This concept is a simple one and yet seeing it as a Venn diagram is illuminating. It reminds you that there is an intersection—that there are good ideas that seem bad. It also reminds you that the vast majority of ideas that seem bad are bad.

    The fact that the best ideas seem like bad ideas makes it even harder to recognize the big winners. It means the probability of a startup making it really big is not merely not a constant fraction of the probability that it will succeed, but that the startups with a high probability of the former will seem to have a disproportionately low probability of the latter.”

    “The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It’s to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself. The very best startup ideas tend to have three things in common: they’re something the founders themselves want, that they themselves can build, and that few others realize are worth doing.“

    Sam Altman:
    “It’s far better to be thought of—and to think of yourself—as a project than a company for as long as possible.Companies sound serious. When you start thinking of yourself as a company, you start acting like one. You worry more about pretend work involving things like lawyers, conferences, and finance stuff, and less about building product, because that’s what people who run companies are supposed to do. This is, of course, the kiss of death for promising ideas.Worst of all, you won’t work on slightly crazy ideas—this is a company, not a hobby, and you need to do something that sounds like a good, respectable idea. There is a limit to what most people are willing to work on for something called a company that does not exist if it’s just a project. The risk of seeming stupid when something is just a project is almost zero, and no one cares if you fail. So you’re much more likely to work on something good, instead of derivative but plausible-sounding crap.The best companies start out with ideas that don’t sound very good. They start out as projects, and in fact sometimes they sound so inconsequential the founders wouldn’t let themselves work on them if they had to defend them as a company. Google and Yahoo started as grad students’ projects. Facebook was a project Zuckerberg built while he was a sophomore in college. Twitter was a side project that started with a single engineer inside a company doing something totally different. Airbnb was a side project to make some money to afford rent. They all became companies later.“

  2. Why are we solving this emerging industries challenge ourselves, and not creating a Y Combinator-equivalent to generate new startups to explore the new possible areas? What if we crowdsource the development of emerging industries by calling for a remote global hackathon for post-Covid new industries out of Singapore?

  3. Roman roads were primarily built to allow the Romans to efficiently transport troops across their empire. Roads also allowed the efficient flow of trade, which was an optionality, but not the original intent. I recently came across an evolutionary term that best describes this form of optionality: exaptation.

    While exaptations are traits that have been enlisted for new uses*, adaptations have been shaped by natural selection for their current function, (Stephen Jay Gould & Elizabeth Vrba) wrote.*

    (https://www.quantamagazine.org/evolutionary-modeling-study-provides-new-evidence-for-exaptation-20130904/)

    Could a possible way to frame the challenge be about finding exaptative applications of Singapore’s assets in new economic niches of the beyond-Covid world, in order to maintain Singapore’s economic competitiveness?**

    This then points to two pathways to increase exaptative applications of Singapore assets:

    • build more “roads” i.e. adaptive assets with optionality, but first focused on adaptation i.e. Singapore’s needs

    • find more alternative uses of existing assets,

      • corollary: figuring out ways to better enable matching between needs and solutions

  4. I’ve been reflecting on my experience last year in CIID, and trying to summarize what I think is needed for innovation to happen based on all the projects. (See photo: pardon bad handwriting). It might be about enabling interactions between assets in the solution space with assets in the problem space, and having the assets to enable those interactions to allow for the verbs of Listen, Build, Test, Repeat. Could there be equivalent infrastructure or processes that we build to enhance those interactions, at an innovation ecosystem-level across Singapore or ASEAN?

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