Research, innovation and enterprise are essential in shaping Singapore economy into the future. To accelerate Singapore’s thrust towards an inventive, innovative and entrepreneurial economy, the NRF is working with selected elite international research universities to establish a number of world-class research centres in Singapore which will have intensive research collaboration with Singapore-based universities and research institutions. This complex of research centres from world-class research universities and corporate labs, together with the talent they train and their technology transfer activities, form the Campus for Research Excellence And Technological Enterprise (CREATE).
Many US and European universities are eager to establish a presence in Asia in a way never contemplated before because of the keen awareness of the rise of Asia and the increasing shift of global dominance towards Asia. CREATE offers a multi-national, multi-disciplinary research enterprise unlike anything known till now, strategically located in the heart of Asia, at the nexus of East and West. The opportunity to interact with other top research institutions in the world in Singapore adds to the attractiveness of CREATE to global participants. CREATE will therefore be the Asia research campus of these institutions.
CREATE aims to be a talent magnet and innovation hub. The research centres in CREATE will host professors, research investigators, doctoral and postdoctoral researchers who will form research groups to pursue research programmes in areas that are aligned both to Singapore’s strategic interest and those of the respective institutions. CREATE entities would have intensive collaboration with Singapore-based universities, polytechnics, laboratories and research institutes, in cutting-edge research projects and in the attraction of global talent. For example, research centres in CREATE could work with NUS / NTU to jointly recruit graduate students who would be enrolled in NUS and NTU PhD courses but doing their research at CREATE. The students will now enjoy co-supervision by senior faculty at world-class research universities to which CREATE is linked.
CREATE will also host technology transfer activities to push research results towards commercialisation. CREATE could tap the pipelines of business graduate students from universities in Singapore, such as INSEAD and the Singapore Management University, to formulate joint business plans to commercialise research results. Panels and networks comprising venture capitalists and entrepreneurs could be involved as mentors to the researchers, to encourage innovative technology applications and enterprise formation.
Corporate labs of multi-national corporations (MNCs) generate cutting-edge knowledge for products which do not yet exist. The presence of such corporate labs in Singapore would add to our knowledge creation capability and create more research career opportunities in Singapore. CREATE would also house some of these corporate labs to encourage close interactions with the research centres.
CREATE is co-located with the NUS University Town with convenient access to the research resources, students and faculty of NUS One-North and the Science Parks.
The Campus as a whole is expected to house some 1,000 researchers at steady state. The key elements of CREATE are summarised in Figure 1.
CREATE Research Centres
The current CREATE centres are:
- Cambridge Centre for Carbon Reduction in Chemical Technology (C4T)
- Shanghai Jiao Tong University-NUS Research Centre on Energy and Environmental Sustainability Solutions for Megacities
- Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) Centre
- The Singapore-ETH Center for Global Environmental Sustainability (SEC)
- Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, NTU and NUS Centre for Regenerative Medicine
- TUM-CREATE Centre on Electromobility in Megacities
- Hebrew University of Jerusalem's Research Centre on Inflammatory Diseases
- UC Berkeley's Berkeley Education Alliance for Research in Singapore (BEARS) Research Centre
- Ben-Gurion University, Hebrew University of Jerusalem and NTU research centre for Energy and Water Management
- Singapore-Peking University Research Centre for a Sustainable Low Carbon Future
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