PICTURE a scientist who invents something, perfects it, but then gets cold feet when it comes to turning it into a commercial product.

There is a place where he can go to fix that.

Word about Nanyang Technological University's Technopreneurship Innovation Programme (Tip) - a one-year, full-time, master's-level programme - has spread quietly here and abroad.

About 400 applicants vied for 80 places in its seventh run this year, undeterred by the doubling of the course fee to $40,000.

The programme is designed to help students play at taking risks and avoiding common mistakes in their business strategies.

Here, failure does not cost money.

'Practise builds confidence,' says associate professor Tan Teng Kee, Tip's 57-year-old creator.

Students are taught how to protect their inventions with patents, how to position these innovations with a business model, how to write business and capital-raising plans, how to market the product and how to make it through the first five to seven bruising years of the business.

The highlight of the programme: Visits to hotbeds of start-up ventures in Silicon Valley, Seattle, Shanghai and Beijing, where the business plans these students draw up are lobbed at venture capitalists.

If a venture capitalist bites, it is an indication that the plan is viable, one that is realistic in its appraisal of the constraints of going commercial.

And then, for a month every year, the students are attached to the University of Washington (UW) in Seattle, where they receive guidance and first-hand exposure to the technology entrepreneurship 'ecosystem' of the city - home to commercial successes like Microsoft, Amazon and Starbucks.

'Nothing in the programme is textbook driven,' Dr Tan said.

Civil engineer Kahar Hassan, 39, is among the 300 alumni of Tip. He gave up his job as an engineer to take up the programme, and now runs his own 67-man facility in Indonesia making organic fertilisers.

His business, Ijo Corporation, netted $800,000 in sales last year and this year, he clinched a major Indonesian government contract.

Mr Kahar, who also has an MBA, said: 'Tip is oriented towards experiential learning and is a lot less theoretical; I never had to submit technology-driven business proposals to real venture capitalists for my MBA!'

NTU's records show that one in three graduates starts his own business in biotechnology, gaming and media during or soon after Tip.

Programme creator Dr Tan has been there, done that.

He spent about two decades with electronic appliance makers Sunbeam and Electrolux in the United States, Canada and here before striking out as an entrepreneur.

Then, for the next nine years, his own consumer-product companies designed and manufactured products ranging from kitchen to air-circulation appliances.

But he always had a cut-off point. He told his partners that he would, by age 50, return to serve in education.

Financially unencumbered at 48, he began to teach at NTU's Nanyang Business School. Two years later, in 2001, he took up NTU's offer to develop Tip.

To run what he regarded as the Singapore experiment of making entrepreneurs out of scientists and engineers, he visited top universities in the United States and Britain to see what was being done.

Back here, he tailored the curriculum to fit the Singapore context. Students needed to learn that they would not be spoon-fed and that they could think big in tiny Singapore.

He said: 'We are supposed to build an entrepreneurial drive, which has been identified as lacking here. If we had been based in the US, we would not have bothered to create programmes that take students across the world.'

He pointed out that while MBA programmes equip students with the know-how to run established, resource-rich businesses, Tip is for start-ups and getting students 'to believe in themselves and to build teams and live their dream'.

For Tip alumnus and NTU-trained engineer Ngiam Tee Woh, 39, that dream was to help people.

After 10 years designing car-audio equipment for multinational companies, he signed up for Tip in 2004.

Today, he owns a company which designs devices for the elderly or those with disabilities. Mr Ngiam said Tip gave him the confidence to draft a business plan and patent his gadgets - such as the hand-held 'button wearer' which enables arthritis patients to button their clothes.

UW's Professor Howard Chizeck confirmed that engineers around the world get precious little formal or experiential training in entrepreneurship to turn their scientific and technological ideas into commercial successes.

He noted that courses similar to Tip are more often found in business schools and even so, have little focus on technology.

Tip is the subject of the book, The Singapore Experiment - Entrepreneurship And Innovation Can Be Taught, by Cambridge University's Professor Charles Hampden-Turner, who helped refine the programme.

He praised Tip's 'serious play' approach to teaching students how to navigate the pitfalls of starting a business and keeping it going.

'Innovation is serious because if you fail you could lose a lot of money, but it's also playful because that gives it the creative element,' he said.

This article was first published in The Straits Times on May 29, 2008

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