Establishing Support for Academic Entrepreneurship in Universities
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Initiative
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Establishment of University Enterprise Boards
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- A high-level Enterprise Board will be set up in each university to drive innovation.
- The Enterprise Board will be formed from a subset of the university’s Board of Trustees and may include other members with relevant experience.
- The Enterprise Board will manage the university’s Innovation Fund.
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Innovation Funds for Universities
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- An Innovation Fund will be established in each university to supplement the universities’ internal funding for innovation and entrepreneurship activities.
- The Innovation Fund will fund entrepreneurship education, technology incubators, entrepreneurs-in-residence and other programmes, to promote commercialisation of university technologies.
- Universities will propose the activities that are to be funded by the Innovation Fund.
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Creating Enterprise Support Structures
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Initiative
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Proof-of-Concept Grants
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- A proof-of-concept is generally needed to show that a technology works and has potential for commercialisation.
- The grant provides funding for researchers based in IHLs to develop such proofs-of-concept for their technology ideas.
- Each grant will be up to a maximum of S$250,000.
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Technology Incubation Scheme
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- Technology incubators provide the environment for the systematic nurturing of young companies before they are ready for venture capital funding.
- The scheme provides 85% co-funding, up to S$500,000, for companies accepted into technology incubators set up in the IHLs, in exchange for equity stake in the company.
- Co-investors have the option to buy out NRF’s share of the company at the next round of financing.
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Early-Stage Venture Funding
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- There is a dearth of VCs to fund early-stage companies.
- The scheme will seed the development of a number of early-stage VC funds to plug this gap.
- NRF will match 1:1 the funds raised by VCs.
- Funds will be managed by professional VCs, and will invest only in Singapore-based high-tech start-ups.
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Disruptive Innovation (DI) Incubator
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- An incubator, based on the disruptive innovation[1] (DI) methodology of Prof Clayton Christensen, will be set up to identify companies that have the potential to disrupt a current industry and create new ones.
- NRF will support the incubator on a 1:1 co-funding basis.
- The investment committee will evaluate the start-ups based on disruptive innovation criteria. The start-ups will be nurtured using the DI methodology.
- A significant proportion of start-ups will be sourced from IHLs.
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Enhancing Technology Transfer
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Initiative
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Translational R&D Grants for Polytechnics
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- Polytechnics play an important role in technology transfer to bring university research closer to market.
- The grant will support polytechnics to perform translational research on the R&D output from universities and research institutes (RIs).
- It will encourage universities and RIs to work with polytechnics as strategic partners to bring research breakthroughs to the marketplace.
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National IP Principles for Publicly-funded R&D
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- A set of principles, guidelines and best practices will be provided for the identification, ownership, protection and exploitation of intellectual property arising from publicly-funded research.
- These principles serve to promote the use of IP from publicly-funded research; encourage participation of local businesses and promote industry-IHL collaboration.
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Innovation Vouchers Scheme
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- Innovation Vouchers will be given to SMEs to procure R&D and other services from IHLs and public research institutions.
- A list of services that could be procured with these vouchers will be released when the scheme is launched later this year.
- The scheme will encourage SMEs upgrade their operations through R&D projects with IHLs and public research institutes.
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Industry Proof-of-Concept and Technology Incubation Scheme
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- These are similar to the schemes above but are not restricted to the IHLs.
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Supporting Innovation Policy Studies
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Initiative
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Innovation Policy Centre
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- A national centre for innovation studies will be set up.
- It will propose policies and initiatives to encourage innovation in both private and public sectors.
- Some examples of projects that the centre could undertake are: Setting up a National Innovation Index, technology forecasting, IP mapping, etc.
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