Mr Lee Yi Shyan at the SHELL Livewire Awards Presentation Ceremony 2007

Speech by Mr Lee Yi Shyan, Minister of State for Trade and Industry and Minister-in-charge of Entrepreneurship at the SHELL Livewire Awards Presentation Ceremony 2007 on Thursday, 18 October 2007 at 10.15am at ITE HQ Auditorium

Mr Bruce Poh, Director and CEO, ITE

Mr Roger Lee, President, ITE Alumni Association

Mr Lim Huan Chiang, Vice-President of Editorial Services, Chinese Newspapers Division, SPH

Distinguished Guests

Ladies and Gentlemen

I am pleased to join you this morning for the Shell Live WIRE Awards. This Award recognizes budding entrepreneurs who have displayed imagination, courage and acumen in setting up their own companies. It is fitting that we celebrate their success today at ITE.

Remaking ITE

ITE has come a long way since its establishment in 1992. ITE’s full-time students have doubled from 12,000 in 1995 to almost 25,000 last year. Your 'Hands-on, Minds-on and Hearts-on' learning system has won international recognition, with the latest being the Global IBM Innovations Award in Transforming Government. My congratulations to the ITE leadership, staff and students for embracing excellence in technical education.

Many ITE graduates have shown that they have the potential to do well. One good example is ITE alumnus, Mr Eric Chen. From ITE, he went on to further his studies and graduated with an Electrical and Electronics Engineering degree. Today, Eric is working as a researcher at the Singapore Institute of Manufacturing Technology (SIMTech), a research institute of the Agency for Science and Technology (A*STAR).Another alumnus, Mr Tommy Wong, runs a company that manufactures carbon fiber laminations for car interior panels and exterior parts for export.

Seize the Opportunity

For Singapore to remain internationally competitive, we need more alumni like Eric and Tommy. We need home-grown talents with an eye for business opportunities, the guts to strike out into the unknown and the passion to push out to new frontiers. Increasingly, more young Singaporeans are considering entrepreneurship as a career choice. The DP-ACE Start-up Enterprise Survey last year found that seven in 10 founders of new businesses are below 40. Seven in 10 have also achieved at least tertiary level education, which indicates that starting a business was not a fall back option for these entrepreneurs.

As for the budding entrepreneurs amongst you, I want to tell you that the sky is your limit. Think the impossible, think big. I am sure many of you are familiar with Facebook, the social networking site. What you might not know was that Facebook was started by a college student (Mark Zuckerberg) in 2004 as a networking site for his college friends when he was only 20 years old. Three years on, Facebook is now valued at almost US$10 billion

[1]

Envision how you can grow your business to become the next Facebook, the next YouTube, Baidu and Google. These companies have led the way and shown that it is possible to achieve such stunning levels of success, because they had vision and embraced the global economy.

The Action Community for Entrepreneurship (ACE) has been marshaling private sector resources and entrepreneurs themselves to create an even more vibrant entrepreneurial community in Singapore. To succeed, we need more partners to come together – the way Shell, SPH, ITE, and ITE Alumni Association have combined their efforts for this award – to provide support, spearhead and seed the young entrepreneurial spirit for more Singapore success stories in the business arena. I commend these four partners for supporting this initiative to nurture home-grown entrepreneurial talent.

Conclusion

In the new knowledge-based economy, Singapore’s continued success will hinge on how entrepreneurial, creative and innovative we are. Not just in starting new businesses, but also in all aspects of our work and lives. We need to be able to think outside the box, and see the opportunities to add value where others miss. I would go beyond calling this a mindset. This is an instinct – the instinct of an entrepreneur. Breeding this entrepreneurial instinct is Singapore’s key to unlocking the new economy.

I am told that this year’s entries for the Shell Live WIRE Awards are all very promising. Despite being young, they have shown drive, grit and determination to venture into new fields. Above all, I see the same entrepreneurial instinct in each of them. We saw the video presentation of the Shell Live WIRE Awards a moment ago. I am very heartened by the achievements of these young entrepreneurs. I am also happy to see that some have taken on the challenge to seize the exciting opportunities in the global market, and have established their presence overseas.

As you become successful, you will, in turn, inspire younger Singaporeans. In much the same way that you have received invaluable guidance from your mentors throughout your programme, I hope that you would consider guiding other bright young minds like you to realize their entrepreneur dreams. I congratulate the award winners and I wish all of you success.

Thank you.

[1] On 25 Sep 07, WSJ reported that Microsoft is apparently in talks with Facebook to purchase 5% of the latter’s company at up to $500m, which puts the value of Facebook at $10b.