Smart Nation

In October 2014, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong formally launched Singapore’s Smart Nation programme..

Singapore is well poised in aspiring to be a Smart Nation as it brings together knowledge-intensive activities, institutions for cooperation in learning and innovation, and digital spaces for communication and interaction, in order to maximise innovative, problem-solving capabilities towards complex challenges.

Singapore builds on its strong foundation of network readiness, high smart mobile device proliferation and technology-savvy residents to inculcate a culture of experimentation and risk-taking. The country wants to be a test bed for new ideas, from artificial intelligence to virtual reality, robotics and even space debris management. At the heart of Singapore’s entrepreneurship action is the Launchpad, a dedicated zone for start-ups, where they can build a proof of concept and then scale it up quickly, leveraging government support and a ready network of accelerators, incubators and venture capitalists in the eco-system.  

A nation’s performance currently depends not only on its endowment of hard infrastructure, but also increasingly so, on the availability and quality of knowledge communication and social infrastructure. The latter form of capital is decisive for national competitiveness. It is against this background that the concept of the Smart Nation has been introduced as a strategic device to encompass modern urban production factors in a common framework and to highlight the growing importance of ICT’s social and environmental capital in profiling the competitiveness of the country.

Image source: Smart Nation and Digital Government Office.