Industrial estate manager JTC Corporation will be creating more space to groom Singapore’s start-up companies under its LaunchPad initiative. Three new blocks of buildings will be built in one-north to house 250 start-ups.
This adds 12,000 square metres of space to three existing start-up blocks, which were officially launched by Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong on Friday (Jan 23).
The next ‘LaunchPad’ will be in the vicinity of JTC’s CleanTech Park, next to the Nanyang Technological University. The idea is to promote collaboration between start-ups and varsity research experts.
Mr Lee described LaunchPad’s opening as ‘another major milestone’ for the local start-up scene. “Entrepreneurs like you play a very important role in many societies – because you not only keep the economy vibrant, generating jobs, creating new opportunities, imagining things which people thought impossible. But you create new markets and improve the lives of Singaporeans through innovative products and services,” he said.
“And most importantly, through your optimism and derring-do, you give our society the sense that anything is possible.”
He added that the Government is trying to help entrepreneurs have a hassle-free and easier time starting businesses. He said start-up friendly environments facilitate connections between like-minded individuals and companies.
Mr Sven Yeo, Co-founder and Chief Executive of start-up Biomachines hailed the idea of co-sharing spaces. “We are involved in hardware, so we definitely need physical space for workshops and prototyping. And co-sharing space enables us to get space that is suitable for us at affordable rates. When we started, we were not financially stable enough to be able to rent a entire office.”
Mr V S Hariharan, Marketing and Sales Director of sustainable energy company Third Wave Power said: “Can Singapore be an ‘Olympic village’? You can have multiple places where, you know, start-ups come together and collaborate and you could almost think of having supply chain around it?”
90 per cent of the three existing LaunchPad blocks have been taken up by startups, incubators and Venture Capitalists. By 2017, LaunchPad will be able to house up to 750 start-ups.
Source : Channel NewsAsia – 23 Jan 2015