Speech by Professor Ho Teck Hua, President & Distinguished University Professor at MoU Signing Ceremony between NTU Singapore, NUS and Temasek

Welcome Remarks by

Professor Ho Teck Hua

President, NTU

 

Memorandum of Understanding Signing Ceremony

between NTU Singapore, NUS and Temasek

Tuesday, 12 September 2023, 10:55AM to 11:00AM (5 minutes)

Temasek Shophouse

Ms Goh Swee Chen, Board Chair, NTU Board of Trustees;

 

Mr Hsieh Fu Hua, Chairman, NUS Board of Trustees;

 

Mr Russell Tham, Joint Head, Enterprise Development Group (Singapore) Head, Emerging Technologies, Temasek Holdings Pte Ltd;

Professor Tan Eng Chye, President, NUS;

 

Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen,

 

I’ll start by explaining our thinking behind this platform. Eng Chye and I have been debating many times, which university is the most innovative in the world. We all agree Stanford is the best. Partly they were lucky – they were based in Silicon Valley. But more importantly, the way they organise is different, so I'll give you a little statistic for Stanford University. They have about 13,500 inventions and disclosures. The combined number from NTU and NUS is only 4,000. We need to combine to add another 2000, to reach about one-third of Stanford’s invention disclosures. Stanford has done it over a 50-year period, while we’ve done it over 20 years. The number of professors they have is about the same as ours if we combine NTU and NUS.

 

So, you ask yourself this question. Of the 13,500 inventions disclosures, how many generate money? 1 in 5. The second thing is we ask ourselves, of the 13,500 disclosures, how many of them give a return of about a million? 100. So it's one in a hundred to have a chance to generate a revenue of $1 million or higher. How about those above $100 million? Only 3. One of them is Google and if they didn't sell the Google shares, which they sold in 2005, it would have been worth US$9 billion.

 

So, my point is that outliers or blockbuster enterprises really matter in the commercialisation of Intellectual Property (IP). That's the first part of the point I want to make. There are two ways of doing it. The way that I thought was useful was just to launch many start-ups. Hopefully, by chance, you get some lucky ones. This is what we do for the IP licensing policy. We want to liberalise IP policy, to join forces so that anyone who wants to use the IP can get it done quickly within weeks. Hopefully, we get lucky and somehow a few of them will become hugely successful.

 

Another way which not been done before is what we're trying with Temasek. We basically believe that we can curate blockbuster enterprises, by increasing the odds. If you look at Stanford, it is 2.2 in 10,000. So can we actually increase our odds by a 100 times, to 1 in 10 or 1 in 50? So, is that possible? I think it's possible, but you need three critical ingredients to make it happen. The first ingredient is you need to address a big market.

 

This is why we were very careful in choosing the topics, such as energy transition. Why? We think it is going to take off. In fact, we set the minimum lower bound for its market size to be at least $50 billion dollars of market potential. Even if you are off by 10 times, it is still a $5 billion market. It is crucial that we address big market potential and pain points.

 

Secondly, it is about talent. I'll divide it into two parts. The first is technical talent. Combining the forces of the two universities, I say we are world-class. Keep in mind that these are all talents with super high IQs, who can solve the world’s most technical challenges. We need them on demand when we launch a start-up. For instance, if a start-up in the commercialisation phase has a technical problem, how do we solve it? We call a professor from NUS or NTU and we solve it. That is the first step, which we can do. In some areas, we are in the Top 5 in the world, so we can really be very competitive.

 

The second part of talent – we don't have – is venture-building talent. Imagine a professor like us or like me. I don’t know how to do a venture, I want to be nerdy and techy, and we are terrible at building ventures. Currently, our venture-building talents are limited locally. With Temasek's help, we are able to draw talents globally from all over the world. As long as you are an experienced CEO, or you have done entrepreneurship before, or founded many start-ups before, we will bring you in and be complementary to the technical talent that we have. We really need that. In fact, I believe that the critical success of our innovation and enterprise ecosystem is about venture-building talent.

 

Finally, money. It's true that we only put in S$75 million dollars. Our dream is that with Temasek’s and our endorsement, a lot of big companies will also put in money. Once we put seed money into Series A, they will come in to put in more money after that. This is because we have just endorsed a few companies – not a couple of start-ups, but only two a year. We are telling the world these two are hand-picked by us, after a lot of selection and a lot of scrutiny. These are the best we put a bet on and they are based on deep tech and IPs. I really think that this is a game-changer. I’m not aware of any universities which are trying to do this. They are trying what I call the “statistical way”: spin-off many start-ups and hope that they’ll be lucky.

 

Now we are changing the rules of the competition. We're going to curate the success of the start-up with a much better chance than other enterprises, and hopefully, my dream is that one of them will be a blockbuster like Google, whose market worth is US$2 trillion. All the questions about ROIs (Return on Investments) for research will then be resolved once and for all. Thank you.