I refer to M. Nirmala's "Money to be made in inventions" March 31, 1997, Life! I cannot help but recall Tom Cruise's demand, "Show me the money!" in the Oscar-nominated movie, Jerry McGuire. However, if our budding inventors primarily want to see the money, they are better suited to be sports agents rather than true blue inventors.
Visions of becoming a billionaire like Bill Gates are grossly misplaced, because Bill Gates is not a true inventor but more an entrepreneur. The money is not in the invention but in the business of selling the commercial embodiment of the invention. Inventors are great inventors because fundamentally they love the science, they have the freedom to fail, the environment to continue from failure and they have the zeal to solve the problem. If they want to make a quick buck, they should invest in cattle futures like Hillary Clinton.
I'm also concerned about Prof. Hang's, NUS Deputy Vice Chancellor, plans for allowing students to see friends doing laboratory research without the appropriate protocol of securing the intellectual property rights. Such visits may result in some testy legal problems over questions of confidentiality of information, misappropriation of sensitive industrial information and patentability issues of novelty defeating acts and disclosures. Moreover, I am hopeful that the NUS research centers will not ape or struggle behind other universities who have already taken strides in these "hot growth" and media friendly or glamorous areas of R & D.
The touchstone is the willingness to take risks, get into boldly different technical areas and be creative, like Dr. Patel has pointed. In any institutional structure there is bound to be deadlines, mission statements and performance appraisal reports and other institutional checks and controls inherent with bureaucratic set-ups, not many good inventions can come out. There also needs to be the marriage of other disciplines like the social sciences or multi-disciplinary technical backgrounds. For example in the field of biotechnology, there is now the confluence of diverse fields of computer graphic modeling, small particle chemistry, microbiology and lateral thinking in the total R & D quest. If not, there is a possibility that one can miss that missing spark that may ignite the creative firestorm.
So I hope that our Universities' administrators or researchers will not be seduced by merely wanting to appear on the covers of TIME magazine or just have patents as decorative pieces on the walls of NUS. Japanese industry has always been getting patents but these patents usually have narrow patent claims that are patentably distinct but not wide ranging enough to have an impact on competitors. There is a difference in having a paper patent and a real patent that instills fears in competitors. One litmus test is seeing how many international companies are licensees of the patent. If there is no licensee for the patent, then in all likelihood, it is paper patent and even not worth the frame that adorns the patent.
Perhaps, it is important to distinguish that there are two types of inventions, the pioneering basic invention that blazes the trail and starts a whole new genre of technology. US inventors are primarily the ones with the pioneering invention and this is the type of invention that garners the most fame and fortune. Then, there are the improvement inventions that seek to modify or improve the embodiment of the invention for example changing the material of the apparatus. Japanese industrial research is dominant producer of these sort of patents and this is the weakness in their industrial policy. Singaporean inventors and entrepreneurs should try to adopt the best of both paradigms.
For all the hullabaloo from the Ministry of Education focusing on creativity in education and the beefing up of R & D, I hope that there is some light from the heated discussion and action. Creativity cannot be thought, but rather it has to be tolerated. The creative genius is the one who has an unorthodox, different and risky, perhaps even absurd at first blush, solution to a problem. If the solution was not so risky or different, many others would have already come up with the solution earlier.
Sadly, I think that the culture and environment of Singapore cannot tolerate such unorthodox opinions because alternative views are frowned upon and criticized. The Japanese have a proverb, that I guess is equally applicable to kiasu Singapore - deru kui wa utareru - which means that the nail that sticks out, gets hammered the first. There is great societal pressure to conform and this has an adverse impact because some of the best and brightest have left Japan for the US where alternative ideas are encouraged or even allowed to flourish. Japanese scientists have made important inventions & discoveries when they were in the US. The Japanese Government has also recognized this and have recently come up with a multi-hundred million dollar package to reverse this anomaly.
Singaporeans must be liberated from academic fiefdom and enjoy the fruits of academic freedom in the science and the arts before inventions can flourish. However, if there is an overweening sense of not wanting to rock the boat or establishment and this is ingrained from day one, we will not have Thomas Edisons but more bureaucrats and technocrats administering and not inventing.