This top Asian university helped groom some of Singapore’s biggest start-up founders

When Shih Choon Fong became president of the National University of Singapore (NUS) in 2000, he recognised the need to produce more enterprising graduates as the internet looked to become the future.

The Silicon Valley dot-com boom was in full swing, though it would soon bust and put many of the more dubious internet start-ups out of business. Still, the realisation that Singapore had few of its own start-ups led Shih to work with several other professors to launch the NUS Overseas Colleges (NOC) programme.

The hope was that sending students to intern at the surviving technology start-ups in Silicon Valley while studying entrepreneurship in Stanford University would groom them to be more entrepreneurial, which would lead to innovation later down the road, whether through their own start-ups or taking on innovation-related roles in their careers.

Established in 2002, the NOC programme today has expanded to include other technological hubs including Shanghai, Beijing, Stockholm and Israel. Over the last 17 years, over 3,300 students have taken part, and the programme by Asia’s top university has now produced some of Singapore’s most prominent young entrepreneurs who have founded multimillion-dollar companies.

The programme is just one part of a broad and ongoing effort in Singapore to foster innovation in a country whose only resource is its people. Universities such as NUS, as well as the government and the private sector, often work together to foster conditions in which a trained workforce is able to thrive.

Efforts include grants for investors and start-ups, training programmes at universities to groom talent, as well as policies that make it easier to establish a business in Singapore, which attracted regional headquarters for US tech majors such as Google, Facebook and LinkedIn.