SIN Singapore opens doors to innovation opportunities for UK companies
SIN Singapore has been working hand in hand with Innovate UK to find new opportunities for innovative UK companies.
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We’ve helped deliver three missions, with 40 exciting UK companies visiting Singapore. We’ve delivered extensive relationship building and exploration of opportunities, supported new partnerships with Singapore, and built a pipeline of UK-Singapore innovation projects in the Future Cities space. These have led to substantial commercial successes, with more co- innovation projects under development.
Opening the door to new opportunities
Between March 2017 and January 2018, the SIN team in Singapore has collaborated with Innovate UK to jointly organise three “Urban Bridges” missions for UK SMEs to Singapore, under the framework of the UK-Singapore Innovation and Research Partnership. The aim was to bring out innovative and high growth potential UK SMEs to identify opportunities in Singapore’s Future Cities sector. The SIN team (with assistance from DIT at Post) helped design, plan, and deliver three one-week long programmes with Innovate UK. Through these, we have maximised the value of the visits for the companies, introducing them to key players in Singapore’s Smart Nation plans and supporting them to find great partners for co-innovation.
Delivering and measuring the impact
16 months since the first cohort visited Singapore, a consolidated survey run by Innovate UK on the 40 companies who visited Singapore (since Mar 2017) has shown that more than two thirds of respondents are starting or are hopeful of starting a collaboration with Singaporean partners. Initial estimates show signficant return on investment from the missions. From the approximately £160,000 invested in these three Urban Bridges missions to Singapore, about £2.1m of deals and £348,000 of collaborative projects have already been generated, along with an estimated potential pipeline of £5.6m. 100% of the companies surveyed had a positive experience and developed significant insights from participating in the Urban Bridges missions. Metrics aside, the missions have validated the value of the concept of the Urban Bridges programme, and the joint efforts of SIN and Innovate UK to create opportunitites for high potential UK SMEs to collaborate and innovate internationally (in this case Singapore).
SIN Singapore Contact: Hanbin.Zheng@fco.gov.uk