If the bright young locals were offered the same salary and benefits as such ‘foreign talent’, more of them would come back.

The government uses bonded scholarships to tie people down because it’s too cheap to pay local talent what they deserve. (But when it comes to FT, frugality concerns seem to go out of the window.)

At least one stat board even refuses to offer locals who return voluntarily to take up jobs there a moving allowance. As long as you hold a Singapore passport, you will be treated as inferior goods, even if you have the same qualifications as the FT they are so eagerly lapping up.

if it’s suppose to ‘think’, it will become an all-talk think tank with no real impact. if it’s suppose to review policies and make new-gen recommendations, it will end up being red taped because there is no way to really empower them to begin with, if it’s suppose to support entrepreneurs without the current bureacracy, it will end up either (1) not have the muscle/money to, or (2) get shot by the AGO a year later.
(look at IDM, not that i think it made the best choices but at least they tried)

I say forget policy and governance, people who want to change the world will do it with their two hands regardless of their government. (supportive environment helps, but not neccessary) its abt individuals, one at a time to go out and whack at something until something works. who say we dont have enough of them, i think we got plenty. and who say scholars cant take risk, check out ex scholars @ hungry go where, totally ditched their iron rice bowl and going at it.

I think several government agencies are already quite forward thinking in setting up some internal unit to be their “strategic thinkers”, “Devil’s Advocate”, etc. Perhaps the AoF will be a Yoda for all the Jedis out there.

An Agency of the Future sounds remarkably like the ambition for the present incarnation of the UK’s NESTA, the National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts, with which I have a long working association (although I comment here entirely in a personal capacity).

NESTA has set itself up as a champion for innovation in every field of UK national life, for example hosting an event last week entitled Reboot Britain. In practical terms, its work translates into three broad areas of work: a think-tank policy division; an investment division and a division that attempts to pioneer new ways of working, particularly in the public sector (with a view to then handing over the new ways that work to agencies who can roll them out nationwide).

The intentions of NESTA are good and it is too early to tell what the long-term impact will be but, as a semi-outsider, I do see several learning points.

The policy and investment divisions seem like poles of a spectrum that runs respectively from Macro- to Micro-economic policy. Each has a relatively clear mandate and modus operandi: producing research papers and conferences, and backing growth businesses respectively. One could argue that these divisions rather duplicate what already exists elsewhere (in the Higher Education, Consulting and Finance sectors respectively) but they seem to do good work.

Running the programs division seems to have proved a much harder challenge, for all sorts of reasons that I have discussed with its staff on numerous occasions, without being able to suggest a magic answer:

* What’s the mandate? Acting with the best of intentions, in the past the division has seemingly bitten off more than it can chew, trying to solve global warming, re-invent the national health service and re-define economic value chains linking established businesses, all at the same time. Picking a small range of achievable priorities would seem to be the answer to that one.

* How do you scale up and roll-out? In a risk-averse public sector, the last thing that a civil servant suppressing the fear that they are running a mediocre department wants is to be shown up by some bright idea or some new-kid-on-the-block organisation. The instinct to protect established empires is very strong and again and again you hear the questions asked: “Who do these people think they are?” and “This idea was not invented here.” In parallel with the bright ideas, there must be an appetite for radical change to push it through against resistance from the old guard. If it survives, NESTA may find itself with just that appetite in an incoming UK government of whatever party, faced with an acute need to cut costs.

* Where’s the exit strategy? It’s one thing to prove a brilliant new way of doing something when you have an endowment, but quite another to create economically sustainable solutions that don’t just represent another drain on the taxpayer. “Starting with the end in mind” and only taking on projects where a realistic exit is planned seems to be emerging as the best way forward.

I am not sure that something like NESTA transplanted whole to Singapore will bear the fruits desired from an Agency of the Future. However, I do see that somewhere that it’s OK to take risks and pioneer pragmatic solutions could be valuable in Singapore. The ‘not invented here’ syndrome would remain but perhaps the small size and interconnectedness of Singapore’s elite could help to overcome that.

The word ’skunkworks’ is maybe a little too malodorous-sounding in a country legendary for its cleanliness, but it could just be what’s needed.

Based on my past experience, the different ministries and agencies have the uncanny behavior of creating turf wars due to their leadership trying to get recognition from the higher ups. These turf wars may result in AOF being stuck fighting with other gov organizations instead of focusing on the executing the projects.

I’m sure this idea isn’t new. What’s new is in the greater degree of deviation from the yoke that I am proposing. Of course, the devil is always in the details.

Singapore pays for tertiary education: NUS is cheap, compared to overseas universities. Singapore will even pay for an overseas university, but there’s a catch: you’re bonded for 4, 6, 8 years.

Not only do young men give up 2 years of their lives for NS, they’re now asked to give up another half a decade to do jobs they don’t want to. Last night I heard a story of a brilliant scholar coming back to Singapore and being assigned to work at one of our four national garbage incineration plants.

The Singapore government keeps telling us that our knowledge-worker citizens are our most precious resource.

If that’s true, then why aren’t we allowing a free market economy in human capital to efficiently allocate that resource? A command economy in human labour is as regressive as anything from the darkest days of the Soviet Union.

In the US there is a principle that you can’t make someone work against their will: employment contracts can only bind you so far.

In Singapore I would like to see banks offer loans to scholars to help them get out of their bond. These loans should be available and open and advertised. If a scholar applies for a job in the private sector and gets an offer letter, she should be able to take that offer letter to a bank and buy herself out.

In fact, I would go even further.

I would try something radical: give free scholarships to the top 15% of our JC students. If they get into a local school, great, no charge. If they get into a foreign school, great, no charge either. Four years, free ride.

What happens after that? Let them go wherever they want.

“Excuse me? That’s my tax dollars you’re spending,” you say. “I want to see them come back and pay back their debt. How? Bond them lor.”

But no. There’s a buried assumption there, and I don’t like it.

The assumption is that Singapore is inferior, that nobody who’s had a nice foreign education would live and work here if they didn’t have to.

Where does this strain of negativity and insecurity come from? It may have been true in 1972 but it’s not true today.

The facts on the ground are: plenty of people who’ve had nice expensive Harvard / Cambridge educations choose to come to live and work in Singapore. We call them “foreigners.” We give them visas. They become PRs and sometimes even citizens.

So let our best students go overseas. Don’t worry about the brain drain. Don’t impose a bond. That’s scarcity thinking, zero-sum thinking. We’re past that.

Heck, if the best students get jobs overseas, that’s a good thing. They’re building networks, gaining experience.

One day they’ll look at the world, ask themselves where they want to live and raise children, and they’ll find Singapore at the top of the list.

Then they’ll return.