Businesses do not innovate, it's people who do

THE Singapore government's Budget announcement in favour of innovation and growth is necessary, but not a sufficient condition to drive business innovation.

Since the Budget was handed down on March 24, much has been said in favour of the government's effort to incentivise and make businesses not only productive but also innovative and internationalised. The Industry Transformation policy plank which stresses technology-driven innovation is a step in the right direction, no doubt, but is it still missing one key ingredient - motivation for people to innovate?

For long, in some cases too long, we hear or know of people who spend large chunks of time 'in' the business rather than 'on' the business - no matter whether it's a large multinational bank or a SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) in the manufacturing sector. Indeed, the findings that emerged from a Spring-funded study where we analysed practices of 215 SMEs in the manufacturing sector are telling.