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Case Study

Singapore’s Blue Ocean Journey:

Two Decades of Value Innovation
Authors: Matin Ling and Serena George; Directors of Value
Innovation at Blue Ocean Consulting™

The story of Singapore’s development in the global economy cannot be easily

condensed, but some stellar achievements over the years prove that it deserves a
place as one of the most impressive in history. In 2020, Singapore attained the top
spot in the IMD Business School’s World Competitiveness Ranking1, and from 2006 to
2020 it ranked between first and second in Ease of Doing Business2 globally while
holding its position as the top country in Asia for those years. Bloomberg’s Innovation
Index which measures – among other indicators – R&D investment and patent activity,
placed Singapore as the third most innovative economy in the world, just behind
Germany and South Korea.3

When these feats are placed in context, the story appears even more implausible, for
Singapore is a very young country of less than 60 years with fewer than four million
workers, and possessing no natural resources in a land area marginally smaller than
New York City.

Dr Tan Chin Nam, former Managing Director of Singapore’s Economic Development

Board observed,

“We were constantly looking to reinvent ourselves during

the early years and we looked to many countries such as
Switzerland to learn from their ways of doing things.”

Dr Tan, who joined the Singapore Civil Service in 1974 as a young systems engineer
rose to become Singapore’s Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Information,
Communications and the Arts over a three-decade long career. During his public
service, he invited an illustrious list of some of the world’s most esteemed
intellectuals to Singapore who imparted their ideas to a generation of leaders in the
private, public, and people sectors. He vividly recalls how one of these engagements
catalysed public policy thinking during a pivotal period in Singapore’s development.

“It was at the 2003 World Economic Forum in Davos that I

first met Professor W. Chan Kim. I listened attentively as he
expounded his strong views on the global economy and
watched as his ideas on value innovation provoked the
thoughts and challenged the imagination of the Davos
crowd. I felt it was imperative to invite him to speak in
Singapore later that year,” recounts Dr Tan.

Professor Kim, The Boston Consulting Group Bruce D. Henderson Chaired Professor
of International Management and Co-Director of the INSEAD Blue Ocean Strategy
Institute, and Professor Renée Mauborgne, INSEAD Distinguished Fellow of Strategy
and International Management and a Co-Director of the INSEAD Blue Ocean Strategy
Institute, visited Singapore twice in 2003. They participated in a number of
engagements with leaders in the public and private sectors and gave two keynote
speeches under the auspices of the then-Ministry of Information and the Arts (MITA)
with nearly 2,000 attendees in total.4

Their brief but impactful engagements in Singapore that year generated very strong
interest among diverse organizations on the potential of Value Innovation. In
response, the Professors proposed the creation of the Value Innovation Action Tank
(VIAT) which was envisaged as an institutionalized community of practice for value
innovators in the private, public and people sectors.

Dr Tan remarked that, “the name of the entity is owed to

Professor Kim who insisted that it be called an Action Tank
rather than a Think Tank. He argued that everything that
VIAT did had to be actionable, and this remains true today
in Blue Ocean strategic moves globally.”

VIAT was formally established in March 2004. Lim Siong Guan, who was Head of Civil
Service chaired the board with Professors Kim and Mauborgne. Later on, Peter Ho,
who succeeded Lim as Head of Civil Service also became chairman. Fourteen
ministries, statutory boards and a government-linked company became the founding
partners of VIAT.

VIAT’s core objectives were first, to provide practical Value Innovation frameworks,
processes, tools and education programmes to enable Singapore and its enterprises
to transition to the knowledge economy in an action-driven manner; second, to serve
as a unique one-of-its-kind global repository of knowledge to enable the creation,
codification and deployment of Value Innovation intellectual material; third, to offer a
common strategic planning language to orchestrate multi-agency initiatives
straddling across the private, public and people sectors; and fourth, to build local
Value Innovation expertise through an action-driven coaching process.

VIAT was a key underlying framework in the arsenal for repositioning Singapore in the
new economy. One of the most strategic initiatives that arose out of VIAT’s work was
World.Singapore (pronounced, ‘World Dot Singapore’). This was the Singapore public
sector leadership’s expression of the strategic direction that they saw as critical to
Singapore’s positioning on the world’s stage.

Dr Tan explained, “we wanted our global partners

and investors to see Singapore as a good place to
live, work, and play because they could trust our
system and our anti-corruption stance, our
strength as a knowledge-based economy, our role
as a business hub in ASEAN and our connections to
other global cities, and finally in our highly livable
environment. The four pillars of ‘Trust, Knowledge,
Connected, and Life’ underpinned
World.Singapore.”

The thrusts of World.Singapore had a transformative and lasting impact on the

strategic thinking of the public sector.5 It was embraced by the Economic
Development Board (EDB) and also adopted by several government agencies
“consciously or subconsciously through their communications and the internal
alignment of their staff,” recounts Dr Tan.

The EDB is the key government agency responsible for Singapore’s master economic
planning. In the years just after Singapore’s independence, its industrialization
strategy was overseen by the EDB to much success, raising Singapore’s status to one
of the four Asian Tigers.6 Since its formation in 1961, the EDB has played a central role
in Singapore’s economic transformation and continues to lead the essential task of
luring global investors and top talent to Singapore.

EDB’s senior management teams are known for their industry knowledge,
innovativeness, resourcefulness, tenacity and client relationship management,
underscoring the EDB’s preeminent role in attracting international investments and
businesses to Singapore. Strategic directions – such as World.Singapore – that are
embraced by the EDB therefore had an outsized influence to Singapore as a whole.

Since the inception of the VIAT in 2004, the practice of Blue Ocean thinking continues
to have a direct and indirect impact on the shaping of various initiatives in Singapore.
In February 2020, a Blue Ocean Roundtable conversation was held with leaders in the
private, public and people sectors. This conversation once again saw an eagerly-
sought engagement with Professor Kim, who together with Professor Mauborgne,
earned the distinction of being named the #1 Management Thinkers in the World for
2019 by Thinkers50.7

“I hope that more of such Roundtables can

continue in the future, particularly in these
difficult times of economic and geopolitical
uncertainty, and disruptions to our well-being
caused by the coronavirus pandemic,” expressed
Dr Tan.

The value of Blue Ocean thinking and its resulting initiatives will be hugely beneficial
not only to the current transformations taking place in the economy, but also in the
crucial task of reskilling and pivoting the workforce towards new growth sectors. The
canniness and ability to create new opportunities in a volatile, uncertain, complex,
and ambiguous climate – so-called ‘VUCA’ conditions – will be the decisive factor in
the destinies of countries in the foreseeable future. Achieving this would truly allow
policymakers and business leaders to find expansive new blue oceans.

1. https://www.imd.org/news/updates/IMD-2020-World-Competitiveness-Ranking-revealed/

2. https://www.doingbusiness.org/en/rankings

3. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-18/germany-breaks-korea-s-six-year-streak-as-most-innovativenation

4. The Ministry of Information and the Arts, Singapore (MITA) was the predecessor of the present Ministry of Communications a

nd Information (MCI).

5. https://www.nas.gov.sg/archivesonline/data/pdfdoc/20070419990.htm

6. The Four Asian Tigers are Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Taiwan. Their economies experienced rapid growth by lever

aging on industrialization and export orientation. They remain among the wealthiest economies today.

7. https://thinkers50.com/biographies/w-chan-kim-renee-mauborgne/

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