Launch of Singapore Polytechnic’s Business Essentials through Action (BETA) Programme

Speech by Mr Alvin Tan, Minister of State, Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth & Ministry of Trade and Industry at SP’s School of Business BETA Programme on 15 Nov 2024

Mr Soh Wai Wah, Principal & CEO, Singapore Polytechnic

Mr Tony Soh, CEO, National Volunteer and Philanthropy Centre

Ms Chui May Yee, Head of Marketing and Youth Outreach, MentoringSG

Xavier and Natalie, who walked us in earlier

Distinguished Guests,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Introduction

1. Thank you for coming in on a Friday. First, happy 70^th Anniversary to all of you. I’ve worked for your principal Mr Soh Wai Wah and for Tony because of Company of Good’s roundtable, and May Yee because she’s running MentoringSG. As I thought about this Business Essentials Through Action (BETA) programme, the word BETA actually has a few origins. The first is a derivative of the Phoenician term which was then adopted by Greeks which means Home. SP, I think that’s where you start – Home. Wearing my hat from the private sector, I thought it’s useful for us to think of BETA in a few ways.

Risk: The meaning of Beta

2. Risk, Review, Reward. If you think about Beta in the finance sector where I spent some years, Beta actually means risks. It’s a term that financial professionals will come across. It’s a term to measure risks. Zero-beta means there’s no risk. If it’s greater than 1, it means high risk. For example, Tesla stocks increased very fast when Trump was announced as the new president and now it has gone down – that means a high beta stock. It refers to security, it refers to your portfolio.
3.  If you are a little bit more aggressive, you will buy security stocks that is high beta. If you are a little bit more conservative, you will buy stocks which are quite standard. They have quite boring returns. And that is exactly what we need to think about. Because the world is incredibly volatile. If you look at geopolitical risks, you look at wars, you look at elections abroad that will have an impact on Singapore, and then you look also at climate risk.
4. I was just in Sentosa earlier, the last two days, we were talking about how our tourism sector is open to climate risk, and what we must do, and how do we lower our risks. So in a world where you have geopolitical risks, political risks, financial risks, climate risks, how can entrepreneurs come up with new products and services to address these risks? That is a finance term.
5. Now I move to another sector which I worked in, which is tech. The tech sector also uses beta. How? If you start with a product, that's your alpha phase. You ask all of your companies, your employees, to test a product. In the tech sector, we call this dogfooding. Really, that's a term that we used when I was in tech. That means whatever product that we use, create, or are testing out, the employees use that product. Just to see and iron out the bugs.
6. After the alpha phase, if everything is good, you go to the beta phase. The beta phase allows you to go to the market and allow customers to test it out. That is the beta phase. Then, if it works, you go to the general application phase, the capability phase, where that's basically how you go to the market. So this beta phase also has implications to what you are doing here at SP and what the mentoring movement as a whole, together with NVPC, has got to offer.

Review: Importance of Structured Mentoring

7. The beta phase is important when you are testing out a product to see whether it works. And how do you see whether something works or not? You need good mentors. You need good mentors in your company, and outside of your company, to see and test whether the product works, whether it gels well with the consumers, and whether the market will accept that product.
8. That's where mentoring and the industrial mentoring that we are putting together with NVPC and MentoringSG, are important. We were at the National Mentoring Summit earlier this month, at Marina Bay Sands. May Yee and the team did an incredible job. We talked about why mentoring matters, and how we are elevating this question. In fact, we commissioned Verian on a study of the youth mentoring landscape in Singapore. It tries to answer the question on what kind of mentoring works.
9. What kind of mentoring works? It’s not just the one where I go to Tony, and Tony gives me some advice. That's also good, that's called informal mentoring. But the Verian study is giving us some clues as to what kind of mentoring works, and it's actually structured mentoring. Structured mentoring is where it's consistent. There's a set of goals when you start and say, “I'm going to start. These are what I want to do, these are what I want to accomplish at the end of the mentoring.” Structured mentoring is important.
10. That's why today's MOU that we're signing, the partnership between SP, NVPC and mentoring SG, is important because we are trying to put a structure to the mentoring process where industries are involved. And that will help you to have good mentors that are real in the market, to help you through every little bit of the database that you get. That's why it's important. So, Risks, Review – constantly reviewing with the help of mentors. And finally, Reward.

Reward: The joy of mentoring

11. Mentoring is something which I find personally incredibly rewarding as a mentee. And incredibly rewarding as a mentor. Both mentee and mentor reap the rewards of mentoring. When you mentor someone, you actually learn from them.
12.  I have met Elena Poh, an SP student who was interning at the MAS. I met her at the Singapore Fintech Festival. An incredible student. When I posted about her on my LinkedIn, somebody said, “Hey, did you know that Elena was super helpful during the Singapore Fintech Festival?” I was actually able to speak to her, and asked her why she had decided to come to the Singapore Fintech Festival, and chose to intern with MAS. She said, “Oh, I'm really interested in finance, and I want to see how public sector finance can help Singapore.”
13. The Fintech Festival is actually an incredibly entrepreneurial space. Using finance, using tech to come up with solutions to bank the unbanked. To come up with solutions to make payments more smooth. To come up with solutions, even beta solutions, to help solve issues such as money laundering and solve scam issues. So when Elena told me that she wanted to learn more, I found it incredibly rewarding just to listen to her. And so we had a conversation. And every time I’ve had a conversation with somebody else as a so-called mentee, I learned a lot. Much less so, mentees learn from mentors.
14. One of my mentors, in the public sector was our then chairman of MAS, and now our president, Tharman Shanmugaratnam. Mentors always give us time. I remember coming in fresh from the private sector, and then coming into the public sector. Then Minister Tharman said, “Alvin, join MAS”. And I said, “but sir, I don't know much about central banking. Investment banking can, central banking cannot”. He says, “don't worry, you come and if you have anything, you come and ask me”. So he availed himself, no matter how busy he was, he availed himself and he gave me tips. He said, this is how you think about things, and he mentored me. So over the next three years, I started to learn and grasp what central banking is. And I'm able to probably make some contributions thanks to this mentor.

Conclusion

15. This beta programme is important. I think it's a huge potential for all of you to experience how to manage risks, experience the review process as you go through as entrepreneurs, and to reap the rewards of being both a mentor as well as a mentee. And with that, thank you very much to Tony, Wai Wah, May Yee, as well as the SP team. Thank you very much.