Commercialising Technological Innovation

Piloted by NUS Enterprise as the first entrepreneurial education programme for researchers, the Lean LaunchPad Singapore programme was launched in June 2013 to help research scientists and engineers turn their inventive technologies into commercially viable products and feasible business ventures. Modelled on the US National Science Foundation I-Corps programme and taught at Stanford, Berkeley, Columbia, the programme is adapted for the local context, designed as an evidence-based innovation platform for the commercialisation of deep technologies.

With new funding from 2017-2022 by the National Research Foundation Singapore (NRF), Singapore’s Institutes of Higher Learning will work together to create a national LLP platform combining educational efforts, entrepreneurial talents and technology commercialisation capabilities to facilitate the commercialisation of technologies out of academic research. Together, the combined resources will strengthen the innovation ecosystem at the national level.

Modelled after the US I-Corps programme framework, new LLP satellite nodes will be established in Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) & Singapore Management University (SMU). Trained in the LLP pedagogy, they will serve as decentralised sites to conduct the programme within their campuses and catalyse the engagement of academic researchers from all publicly-funded institutes to the programme. The satellite node network will scale up the market potential assessment of more technological innovations, to generate a pipeline of commercialisable technologies that may flow into downstream follow-on programmes.

To access an overseas market, LLP graduating teams are eligible for a grant of up to SGD$10,000 to support further market validation work overseas related to their project. The grant will be administered by the National University of Singapore (NUS), co-funded by the respective institutions and NRF Singapore.

Unlike the traditional structure of lectures and case studies, the pedagogy of Lean LaunchPad Singapore promotes experiential learning through the search and discovery process and cultivates entrepreneurial thinking.

As a participant, your learning will center around three key principles:

• Customer discovery
• Business model development
• Agile engineering

Each team of participants is anchored around a proprietary technology with a real opportunity to convert it into an exciting investable business. You can expect to receive expert guidance from experienced faculty members, industry mentors and entrepreneurs.

After 10 weeks, teams will graduate with a clearer sense of how to develop your technologies into commercial products and identify concrete commercialisation pathways forward.

Watch this video to find out more about how you can learn to commercialise your research and inventions with the Lean LaunchPad Singapore programme.

You can find out more and register for the programme on the official Lean LaunchPad Singapore website.