ISS Seminar: Paying it Forward Book Launch: Asia's Entrepreneurs: Dilemmas, Risks and Opportunities

Dr. Virginia Cha

Dr. Virginia Cha is an active researcher, educator, mentor, and angel investor in Singapore's entrepreneur ecosystem after 32 years of executive management in technology companies, with previous roles as founder and CEO of venture-funded, hi-tech companies in Singapore and China with successful exits on NASDAQ and HKSE. Virginia's research interests are in entrepreneur decision-making and shanzhai innovation models, and have written multiple teaching cases on these subjects. She is an active educator in entrepreneurship and teaches at multiple institutions in Singapore: "Technopreneur", a National Infocomm Competency Framework (NICF) course at ISS; "New Venture Creation" course at Fudan University; multiple MBA entrepreneurship courses at INSEAD. In addition, she is an active mentor and angel investor to early stage startups, with focus in technology ventures at INSEAD, NUS, and SMU. She is also the chairperson of her own investment holding company with R&D office complex at Tsinghua Science Park in Kunshan, Jiangsu province, PRC.

Virginia earned her Ph.D. in Innovation from the National University of Singapore and her B.S. in Information Computer Science from the University of Hawaii. She started her career as a systems programmer at Burroughs Corporation in the U.S.

Ms Jennifer Lien

Ms Jennifer Lien spends her days working to get fresh research into curious minds. After graduating with a degree in political science and social development studies, she moved to Singapore to explore the new (to her) world of IT. After one happy year researching and writing on technology in Asia, she forayed into the world of academic publishing where she now enjoys working with research outputs in a different manner. She is an active young editor and writer, and regularly contributes to OpenBrief, a Singapore-based creative journal, and Secret {W} Business, a community for female entrepreneurs and innovators.

Prof. Arcot Desai Narasimhalu Director, Institute of Innovation & Entrepreneurship, Singapore Management University

Prof. Arcot Desai Narasimhalu has more than 35 years of innovation and innovation management experience. During this period, he has personally created or directed the creation of several innovations that have been commercialised. He is the Director of the Institute of Innovation and Entrepreneurship of the Singapore Management University (SMU) and concurrently a Practice Professor of Information Systems at SMU’s School of Information Systems. Desai was previously with Kent Ridge Digital Laboratory as a Senior Director where he was managing ideation, intellectual property, business development, licensing, legal, corporate communications and new initiatives. Kent Ridge Digital Lab created cutting edge technologies that were translated into about twenty start-ups. These start-ups received more than S$100 million in investments from venture capitalists and corporate investors.

Desai has successfully raised several rounds of research and other grants from Singapore government agencies and international agencies. He was instrumental in raising 6.5 million dollars from Singapore’s National Research Foundation. He had previously raised more than S$12 million for different research projects. Desai is an advisor to several start ups outside of SMU and is a member of the International Scientific Board of the Information Retrieval Facility based in Vienna, Austria. He is a member of the editorial boards of several scientific journals and is a member of the Board of Advisors of the International Society for Professional Innovation Management.

Mr. Leslie Loh Red Dot Ventures

Mr. Leslie Loh graduated from Saint Mary’s University, Canada, in 1982 with a bachelor of Commerce, majoring in Finance and Information Technology. Leslie was the Founder, Chairman and CEO of System Access since its inception in 1983. He played a major role in leading System Access from being a one-man outfit to a publicly listed global banking software organization with 10 offices and 500 staff in Europe, Middle East and Asia. The company was acquired in 2006 by SunGard Data Systems INC, USA, a leading global financial services software provider.

Leslie was selected as the winner of the 1998 ASME Rotary Entrepreneur of the Year in Singapore. In 1999, he received the National Youth Award (Individual) for his success as an entrepreneur and, in 2006, he was awarded the “Person of The Year” IT Leader Award by the Singapore Computer Society. Since 2008, Leslie has been actively involved in investing and nurturing high-tech startups in Singapore and the region via his investment vehicles, Extream Ventures and Red Dot Ventures. He is currently a board member of SPRING Singapore and was an IDA Board Member (Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore) for 2 terms from 1999 to 2003.

Mr. Chak Kong Soon Stream Global

Mr. Chak Kong Soon has been in the ICT industry for more than 25 years. His passion in building and nurturing organisations led him to collaborate with several prominent individuals to start Stream Global Pte. Ltd, a local "Venture Catalyst" whose main objective is to invest in and partner with entrepreneurs and assist them in realising their potential. In addition to being the Managing Partner of Stream Global, he is mentoring several ICT organisations in the region. Prior to this, he founded and ran a few companies; among them were Finesse Software, Finesse Alliance, Fuziq Pte Ltd, Elcom Software, and several others. He is also currently a Board Member on several technology companies in the region. Chak is currently the President as well as a Fellow of the Singapore Computer Society (SCS).

Mr. Ronnie Wee IncuVest

Mr. Ronnie Wee has over 20 years in consulting, startups, angel investment, financial services, government, telco and technology. He started his career with Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) focusing primarily in Technology Solutions in Financial Services, Telecommunications and Government sectors. Ronnie was the founder of PlaNET Technology Solutions, a software and solutions company, which was eventually sold to Singapore-listed Datacraft Asia. He was also involved in several startups throughout Asia, one of which was successfully listed on the NASDAQ second board . A co-founder of Sirius Angel Fund, a $20m angel fund co-investing with the Singapore Government in innovative, early stage companies, Ronnie continues his work in partnering, assisting and investing in innovative companies, as well as position Singapore as a hub for innovation and development through IncuVest.

Mr. Danny Wilson Pixelmetrix

Mr. Danny Wilson founded Pixelmetrix in May 1999, and has since remained at the helm as President & CEO. Danny began his management career at Hewlett-Packard, Canada. He was the Business Manager of HP’s Communication Measurement Division, responsible for the introduction of the MPEGScope Transport Stream Analyzer and the world’s first ATM/B-ISDN Test System. He later went on to HP Japan, where he established and managed its Asia Business Centre – leading the development of the world’s first multi-port network monitoring system, implemented throughout Japan by NTT.

In 2007, he was appointed to the ITU-T/IPTV-FG Performance Monitoring/Quality of Service workgroup, during which he served as the Editor for two years. Currently, he is a member of the IPTV workgroup in Singapore. He is currently serving on the Technology and R&D Roadmap Working Group for the Singapore Infocomm Media Master Plan Steering Committee. His contributions to several broadcast publications include IPTV and End-to-End Monitoring editorials, as well as a glossary of IPTV jargon. With the advent of Over-the-Top (OTT) TV, he also published a white paper on QoE/QoS Metrics for OTT Television to address the fundamental understanding and practices for managing delivery quality.

Mr. Ng Fook Sun Wirecard

Mr. Chak Kong Soon has been in the ICT industry for more than 25 years. His passion in building and nurturing organisations led him to collaborate with several prominent individuals to start Stream Global Pte. Ltd, a local "Venture Catalyst" whose main objective is to invest in and partner with entrepreneurs and assist them in realising their potential. In addition to being the Managing Partner of Stream Global, he is mentoring several ICT organisations in the region. Prior to this, he founded and ran a few companies; among them were Finesse Software, Finesse Alliance, Fuziq Pte Ltd, Elcom Software, and several others. He is also currently a Board Member on several technology companies in the region. Chak is currently the President as well as a Fellow of the Singapore Computer Society (SCS).

Mr. Dickson Gregory, CEO & co-founder of Paywhere and Mr. Xu Daxiang, CEO & co-founder of Gozo Labs

NUS alumni and young start-ups benefitting from today's ecosystem. Dr. Virginia Cha is an angel investor of these two start-ups.