Plug in, ideate and start up — all in real quick time at Singapore varsity’s Blk71

Unlike the National University of Singapore, the city-state’s sprawling college educator with 37,000 students, its off-campus incubator, Plug-In@Blk71, is where the mood gets grungy. The multi-storeyed unassumingly white building still looks more like the abandoned industrial block it used to be than where some of the university’s most successful start-ups sit down to write code.

Blk71, one of three NUS incubators, currently supports about 30 companies with founders from 12 countries. Over a 100 start-ups have graduated from Blk71’s incubation programme since it started in 2011.

In it own campus, NUS has come up with N-House, an ‘enterprise-themed residence’ that houses a joint dormitory for entrepreneurially-minded students. Most residents here are part of the university’s overseas college programme, where select undergrads spend anywhere between a few months to a year at foreign universities or entrepreneurial hubs, such as Silicon valley, New York, Shanghai, Stockholm, Israel and India.

Lily Chan, CEO of NUS Enterprise (which manages both Blk71 and N-House), explains : “If you’re not in Silicon Valley, communities like these need to be created, architected and sustained.”

Chan says Singapore’s national innovation council, the RIEC, has allocated S$16.1 billion (over $12 billion) for research and entrepreneurship from 2011-15. The university incubator not only provides funding for students, but also mentorship, test markets, infrastructure, management and accounting, asking for precious little in return.

Singapore’s unchanging stable political climate also helps. Setting up business is easy, taxes are low, with start-ups and small businesses getting exemptions, and capital gains completely exempt.

The city-state also goes out of its way to protect intellectual property rights. Even businesses that don’t technically operate in Singapore find it easier to use it as base. Milaap (a micro-lending firm) and Ourhealthmate.com (targeted at Indian expats who want their folks back home to see a doctor), both Blk71 graduates, are run by Indians. They operate primarily in India but are based in Singapore.

Sourabh Sharma, co-founder of Milaap, had lost $66,000 of NUS funding when his first start-up, a video-sharing app on the Symbian operating system, went belly up. Sharma says he was nervous about approaching NUS with Milaap, “but they encouraged me to start again.”

With its three incubators, Chan says NUS generates about 300 new start-up ideas every year; less than half of those progress into companies. But even that is a good number of new businesses for a university in a given year.

(The writer was in Singapore at the invitation of the Singapore government.)

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