A key part of Singapore’s research and development strategy in the next five years is to address complex national problems such as energy – and then turn the solutions into business opportunities.
This strategy was outlined in the National Research Foundation’s (NRF) Addendum to the President’s Address, released yesterday.
The NRF was set up in 2006, under the Prime Minister’s Office.
In its first five years, it identified three strategic areas of research: taking biomedical sciences from the bench to the bedside; strengthening expertise in environment and water technologies; and growing the niche field of games and entertainment in interactive and digital media.
It also started a number of research centres – such as the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology, a tie-up with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – and fellowships, and said these would continue to generate knowledge.
Earlier this year, the NRF announced its first ‘National Innovation Challenge’ to encourage the development of energy solutions that can be used in the next 20 years to help Singapore improve its energy efficiency, cut carbon emissions and increase energy options.
Such solutions ‘will also be useful to other cities facing similar challenges’, the NRF Addendum said.
In the ‘near future’, two more such challenges will be identified, it added.
Some research here is already starting to address the energy challenge.
At Temasek Polytechnic, hydrogen fuel cell researchers received a grant to study and test their technologies from the NRF via the Clean Energy Programme Office (now the Energy Innovation Programme Office).
The polytechnic also has various partnerships with universities here to get funding for more basic research, and with government agencies and industrial partners to carry out trial runs of fuel cell technology.
For example, it signed an agreement with the Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore to test technology in the maritime industry.
And one of its partners has ‘made it’, said Mr Cham Yew Thean, manager of the Singapore Fuel Cell Community, which is based at the polytechnic and brings together researchers, start-ups, and other industry partners.
Home-grown firm Real Time Engineering worked on a small-scale power plant at Temasek Polytechnic’s Clean Energy Research Centre for three years. In June, it got a contract to develop a 1MW fuel cell power plant and test it at the upcoming CleanTech One industrial park in Jalan Bahar.
Other research, such as projects in the biomedical sciences, may take time to develop.
Said Professor Patrick Casey, senior vice-dean for research at the Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School: ‘Before biomedical research can be advanced to the point where there is commercial interest, we need to understand as fully as possible the molecular basis of the disease’ and to identify patients most at risk from it.
Scientists, he said, must work together across the whole spectrum of research types ‘to provide the best likelihood of generating new diagnostics and therapeutics that can impact the disease; these then become the commercial products of the research’.
