Thursday, December 21, 2006

Business vs. Technology

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From Young Singaporean Entrepreneurs are not Pop Idols by Bernard Leong on sgentrepreneurs:
The next problem that I see in Singapore is that everyone wants to be the business people and no one wants to be an inventor. Singapore are short of good technologists and geeks...oftentimes, there are a lot of money but no good ideas... Actually, the reason is simple. Any fool can learn business lingo, marketing and financial stuff...The technologists have an unique selling point that will always tip them in the stronger position. So, lack of innovators make up most of the problem in young entrepreneurs.
Well said, Bernard! That is sooooo true!

Every other day, I see my friends joining the leading banks as IB. And these guys are all engg students - brilliant ones in fact. But I guess the lure of money and a “work-hard-party-harder” lifestyle is just too strong!

The other possible reason for this is the fact that technology and engineering is no longer cool! I mean, for some odd reason, over the last 30-40 years, business graduates and business schools have been given this unfair advantage over their technology counterparts. We all know that a biz school grad (who partied his/her way through college) gets paid much higher than someone who slogged his/her feet through a PhD. Hell, its probably easier for them to get girlfriends too!

But then, just looking at the statistics tells us that Silicon Valley was almost entirely built by technologists! From the Fairchilds to the Apples, from M$ to Google… it was all done by geeks! Noone is claiming that these guys are good at running businesses. But they are good at giving birth to innovations that can change the world.

And that is precisely what we need in Singapore. Innovations.

Prashant.

2 comments:

sherene said...

think u land in sg today ya? welcome back to sg n all that. see ya on 7th :)

Benjamin Koe said...

Hi, I'm sorta new to your blog, but just wanted to add to your post on the need for technology innovators in Singapore. Many of us still like to think of engineering/programming as some ability the rest of us don't have. But that's gradually changing with what's been going on in Web 2.0. I reckon what's more important is the business idea than the technology know-how.

Say if you wanted to do a business around a blog, you don't even need your own server! And that's just a simple example. Imagine the possibilities when web apps like http://www.coghead.com/ get mainstrean. It's all about the ideas mate. Technology only enables.

P.s. I'm very much a technologist myself.