Singapore’s R&D landscape has a reputation for efficiency, and the announcements in this year’s Budget undoubtedly add to our strengths in physical infrastructure. However, there is room to nurture truly visionary scientific research, backed by the idea that detours and exploratory science can yield the most disruptive impact with a longer horizon.
Some might ask why invest in exploratory research, given our resource constraints? The goal is not to supplant applied research, but to increase our offerings to create a fertile ground to encourage potential breakthroughs that may emerge only years after.
In this vein, Switzerland’s Spark scheme offers lessons. The scheme explicitly minimises bureaucracy and encourages high-risk, unconventional ideas, comprising four main points:
First, focus on novelty and originality. It welcomes proposals that challenge existing norms or lacks extensive data, and expressly accepts projects that traditional schemes may deem too speculative.
Second, rapid and flexible funding. Grants of 50,000-100,000 swiss francs are given over a 6-12 month time span to allow room to “fail fast” and pivot quickly.
Third, double-blind proposal evaluation, where applicants and evaluators remain anonymous, guarding against bias that may result from individual or institutional prestige overshadowing each proposal’s intrinsic merits.
Fourth, tolerance for negative results. In Spark’s eyes, even projects that fail can be mined for valuable insights, noting that explorations are essential, even when outcomes are clear.
In Singapore’s context, adopting a Spark-like model would mean carving out a dedicated stream for high-risk, early-stage exploration, where high risk research is explicitly insulated from more traditional performance measures. A possible pilot would be to create “open problems” platforms with prizes, like global cryptography or single-cell biology competitions. After all, the essence of science is uncertainty, and real breakthroughs rarely proceed linearly. Our system has to accommodate exploration and dead ends, and to allow “impossible” experiments.
I also hope that we could consider two further measures in Singapore: allowing principal investigators to use PhD students for high-risk projects, and permitting PIs to use a proportion of grant funds towards exploratory work. The aim here would be to stimulate original ideas rather than confining researchers to incremental pursuits.
Meanwhile, the 2024 Frontier Competitive Research Programme Grant Call announced in May 2024 focuses on “use-inspired basic research”. Could the Minister clarify how substantial the commitment is, which projects have secured support, and how was this publicised to all scientists? Is this a sustained initiative or a one-off call?
To be truly a world-leading R&D research hub, Singapore has to invest in exploration that may take time to bear fruit, or even fail. I hope that the ideas above will contribute to policies that reflect the thinking necessary for Singapore to sustain our competitive edge in an uncertain global innovation race.
