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It is important for Singaporeans to learn how to collaborate well because
1) Changing economic conditions: "new economy" driven by knowledge-based, tech-based industries that run on collaboration model.
2) Increasing interconnectedness in both professional and personal relationships.

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Photo of Singaporeans collaborating during Circuit Breaker

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Partnership with New Zealand during Covid

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SINGAPORE - Singapore and New Zealand will start discussing the safe and gradual reopening of borders as both countries emerge from the coronavirus pandemic, following a virtual meeting between Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong and his New Zealand counterpart Jacinda Ardern.

Such "green lane" arrangements between both countries would see the restoration of connectivity, and facilitation of short-term essential business and official travel, said the Foreign Affairs Ministry (MFA) in a statement on Wednesday.

The leaders had met to commemorate the first anniversary of the Singapore-New Zealand Enhanced Partnership, which paved the way for more collaboration in four areas: trade and economics; security and defence; science, technology and innovation; and people to people links.

They discussed the ongoing pandemic, agreeing on the importance of keeping markets open and supply chains functioning. They also agreed there is scope to cooperate on vaccine development.

"Working collectively is paramount," said PM Lee and Ms Ardern in a joint statement issued after the meeting. "We recognise the importance of multilateralism as essential for global post-Covid-19 recovery, for peacebuilding and prosperity, and for addressing other critical global issues, such as climate change."

Singapore and New Zealand will discuss the development of common standards, systems, and phasing for the reopening of borders "when the time is right and within the context of safe travel zone commitments".

They will also explore the possibility of cooperating to procure pharmaceuticals, and have agreed to work multilaterally on vaccine development, as well as improving access and distribution to ensure that both countries' populations are protected from further Covid-19 outbreaks.

"We will support efforts to make a vaccine, once developed, readily available for all countries, including developing countries in Asia and the Pacific," they said.

Both countries also remain ready to help each other by facilitating access to food products, goods, services and essential supplies - including medicines, medical and surgical equipment - as well as through the sharing of experiences and information.

"More importantly, we remain ready to help each other as we emerge from the Covid-19 pandemic," the leaders said.

Mr Lee and Ms Ardern also discussed issues such as food security, climate change, and the Digital Economy Partnership Agreement between Singapore, New Zealand and Chile. Talks on the free trade agreement, which aims to set up a common set of rules, standards and guidelines for global digital trade and commerce, were concluded in January.

"We understand the role enhanced digitalisation will play in enabling international trade," the leaders said. "Furthermore, we also recognise that enhanced digitalisation will be important for assisting our economies not only recover more quickly from Covid-19, but become more resilient to the effects of global pandemics in the future."

They added: "Looking beyond the immediate response to Covid-19, we will continue discussions on the effects of the global economic downturn and explore options to build resilience into our economies for the well-being of all our peoples."

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Singapore and New Zealand, emerging from Covid-19 pandemic, look to reopening borders

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SINGAPORE - Singapore and New Zealand will start discussing the safe and gradual reopening of borders as both countries emerge from the coronavirus pandemic, following a virtual meeting between Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong and his New Zealand counterpart Jacinda Ardern.. Read more at straitstimes.com.

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Seo Hoon

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https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/-asingaporend-australia-exploring-new-areas-of-collaboration-to-strengthen-partnership

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Article on Collaboration

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Singapore is well into a new era economically, and it will have to change its ways quickly to survive in the new age.

The much-talked-about disruption is no longer out there in the future. It is very much with us. The fear is whether we are too late to respond to it.

Just how urgent the situation has become was driven home for me last week with two bits of news.

The first was the sudden announcement by listed taxi company ComfortDelGro on Tuesday, after the market had closed, that it was in talks with ride-sharing app provider Uber. When a traditional business considers getting into bed with the disrupter, you know things are heading for a crisis.

The second is the news that my own company, Singapore Press Holdings (SPH), is exiting its stakes in two entities of media group Mediacorp, which in turn is turning its print tabloid Today into a digital-only news product. It's clearly a quid pro quo arrangement, with Mediacorp going back to TV, and SPH taking hold of the print space even as it pushes ahead with its forays into the multimedia digital world.

This came 17 years after Singapore's experiment with a media duopoly, with the print and broadcast companies both crossing into each other's territories.

As with other duopolistic structures created by regulators at that time, it was consistent with the ethos then, when the talk was about market liberalisation and competition.

ST ILLUSTRATION: ADAM LEE

But perhaps those structures reinforced a mindset of domestic competition that has become an obstacle to a more collaborative mindset that Singapore needs today, in a global, digital-heavy economy where domestic borders matter much less.

Today, the talk is all about global markets, consolidation and collaboration. But within Singapore, the markets for key services had become fragmented. And the habit of competing had become entrenched in Singapore business leaders' mindsets.

Just as traditional taxi and media companies now have to dialogue with the disrupter, so too do many others. As an open economy, our companies are being buffeted by disruptive changes taking place outside.

Each day brings news of more companies consolidating, selling or buying new entities to integrate their operations.

American online giant Amazon entered the Singapore retail market recently with a modest rollout of its Prime Now service, promising two-hour deliveries of groceries and a limited range of other goods. It's only a matter of time before Amazon's vast marketplace of goods opens up here.

That might be good for consumers. But in business, analysts talk about the "Amazon Effect" - the chilling impact Amazon has on retail and sometimes the real economy when it enters a market.

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba is already active here. It bought into South-east Asian e-commerce company Lazada and online grocer RedMart. Its bike-sharing company ofo is here, claiming over half the bike-sharing market, with more than 100,000 users clocking more than 20,000 bike journeys daily. Alipay, its e-payment system, will soon be ubiquitous.

While Singapore is used to foreign companies operating freely here, the difference is that the game these days is on a different level.

The digital economy and the use of technology and data mean that companies want touch points with customers across their lifestyles.

So Alibaba, for example, will know what you spend on, which groceries, electronics, clothes you buy, where you live and travel to on your bike. Once you have its Alipay app on your mobile phone, it can sell you more things, and gather more information on your habits, which it can then sell to advertisers.

One article in Fast Company magazine in March on innovative companies put it thus: "Hundreds of millions of Chinese consumers now depend on these all-in-one apps to do, well, everything: interact with friends; pay for cabs and utility bills; book hotels, flights, and even dentist appointments; find love; and read news."

Data is so important and potentially so valuable, it has been described as the new oil. Companies team up to get more data. Meanwhile, hundreds of small retailers, and logistics companies, risk being shut down.

I wonder if our regulators and companies sufficiently understand the new economic landscape. They can't operate under business-as-usual mode because the wave of change is already on our doorstep, and entering our homes. It will crescendo into a tsunami soon enough.

Singapore companies have to unlearn the habits of the 1990s, and pick up new mindsets, new tools for the 2020s.

First, they must set aside their natural instinct to compete domestically, and think of ways to collaborate and work together for regional impact.

It may not be easy for Singapore CEOs to get over their habit of competing, to cooperate with each other. Many Singaporean bosses are used to being chief decision-maker in our tiny little outfit, whatever it is. Collaborating means giving up total control and taking on board other interests to be as vital as your own.

We must learn to think differently. We have to think beyond fiefdom, to kingdom; beyond company, to country; beyond personal ego, to joint value.

Already, the failure to cooperate has cost us light years in e-payments. As Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong highlighted in his National Day Rally speech last Sunday, Singapore is surprisingly backward in its adoption of cashless payments for such a high-tech, advanced society.

One bright spot after PM Lee lamented the slow take-up of cashless payments is that Singaporean entrepreneur Tan Min-Liang of gaming company Razer offered to get a team going to set up an e-payment system in 18 months. PM Lee tweeted back asking for a report. Mr Tan is taking up the challenge.

It isn't just companies that need to cooperate. The public sector too should work with the private sector and seek their expertise. So, for example, government agencies putting out a request for ideas and crowd-sourcing for solutions for cashless payments in hawker centres and heartland shops is a good step.

Working individually may be good for your own organisation, but failing to work with others can set back the entire country. Singaporeans who go to Hong Kong have long wondered why their mass transit card Octopus is so widely used in shops, whereas Singapore has the ez-link card for trains and buses, the Nets card for shopping, and the CashCard for electronic road pricing.

Which brings me to the second point: Our regulators must step up.

Companies will have their own vested interests. They may not be inclined to collaborate even when there are benefits from it, or put it off until the situation is desperate, by which time it may be too late.

That's where regulators must play a role. The Land Transport Authority could have been faster to take the lead in restructuring the public transport landscape. The Monetary Authority of Singapore could have moved faster to get banks to cooperate on one e-payment app. It was only this year that PayNow was introduced.

Regulatory agencies must understand that their role is not just to set rules for today. They must be active in facilitating conditions for tomorrow. Step up, and use your regulatory influence to encourage collaboration where necessary. If that fails, use your power to compel.

Take a leaf from the Chinese, who two weeks ago announced something that again got my Singapore-worrier antenna up.

We know that America has its Google, Facebook, Apple, Netflix and Microsoft, each trying to create a digital universe to wall in customers and their data.

China too has its Internet giants - Alibaba in e-commerce, search engine Baidu and social media behemoth Tencent (of WeChat fame). They compete ferociously in China: In 2013, Alibaba bought Yahoo China to try to rival Baidu, while in 2014, Baidu and Tencent teamed up with Dalian Wanda, a real estate group, to create an e-commerce marketplace to take on Alibaba.

Even in communist-run China, competition is vital to keep companies' instincts sharp. But they come together when there is a state interest, and when the regulator steps in.

Just two weeks ago, news broke about a consortium being formed of about a dozen companies, including Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu, insurer China Life Insurance, ride-hailing company DiDi Chuxing and Shenzhen-based Chinese technology conglomerate Kuang-Chi Group.

Their common purpose? Putting nearly US$12 billion (S$16.3 billion) of investments into state-owned China Unicom, a Shanghai telecoms company with a vast reach.

China wants to inject private capital to take its state-owned enterprises to a mixed-ownership model. In return, these investors will get seats on the board.

While there is market scepticism about whether the consortium partners were arm-twisted to accept the deal, and some confusion over the financing rollout, there is no denying that it's a good example of China Inc in action. It shows the political will of the regulator in dreaming up this deal and being willing to sacrifice control over the reformed state- owned enterprise (SOE). It also shows the willingness of fierce competitors to come together for a common good.

When an e-commerce giant, social media company, ride-sharing company and a big telco team up, what data can they unleash for their profits? China's SOE reforms will target banks and medical institutions next. We can only imagine the potential for profits and public good that can unlock. That ability to cross-fertilise functions is one reason that China is leading the world in digital technology.

I am certain that Singapore's business and public sector leaders have seen the future and know what is at stake.

They must know that Singapore is at risk of a complacent slide that will precipitate a quick drop into economic irrelevance. We tend to operate in silos still, behave as though it's business as usual, even as foreign competitors enter our shores.

The watchmen in the tower, who know how the world is changing, must speak up about the threats to our economy. Of course, we in the media too bear a responsibility to inform our readers just how, and how fast, the world is changing. This is essential to get Singaporeans to see the big picture.

And then our leaders must reach out to companies, find common ground and get them to work together so that Singapore companies can level up to embrace the digital economy.

In fact, Singapore's political and economic structure lends itself to collaborative efforts. Its political and public sector elite is interconnected, and via their frequent secondments to government-linked, Temasek-linked or labour movement-linked enterprises, they are also commercially influential.

Everybody more or less knows everybody important in Singapore. It should not be that difficult to reach out to work together.

As a journalist more used to writing on social or political issues than the economy, I hesitated before tackling this issue, which has been bugging me for a while.

In my job as a newspaper editor in charge of op-eds, I read scores of commentaries daily on a wide range of issues. Over the months, I became more aware of the widening gap between Singapore's complacent, peaceful economy - where a national task force is formed over infant milk powder - and the rapid pace of change in global businesses, where companies face extinction from disruption by digital platforms, drones and mergers.

They are here, in Singapore, amid us, disrupting our retailers, our neighbourhood stores, our drivers, our courier workers.

The future is here, and I fear we are not yet ready.

And yet, Singapore has so much going for us. We have smart people. Big, successful companies. Habits of hard work and enterprise. We need to adopt new habits of cooperation and collaboration, and have a more global mindset.

For that to happen, we need leaders in the public and private sectors, and regulators to step up. We need companies to adopt a global mindset, and we need to work together for the long haul.

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Singapore must learn spirit of cooperation to survive disruption

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Singapore is well into a new era economically, and it will have to change its ways quickly to survive in the new age. The much-talked-about disruption is no longer out there in the future. It is very much with us. The fear is whether we are too late to respond to it.

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1. Increase productivity
2. Informed Decisions
3. Establishing Effective Communications
4. Transparency

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Important for Singaporeans to learn how to collaborate well as it leads to:
1. Enhance Relationships.
2. Happy and positive environment encourage positive contribution to the company and society.

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Important for Singaporeans to learn how to collaborate well as it leads to:
1. Increased Productivity & Workflow
2. Innovative Ideas
3. Promotes "Multiculturalism" and develop mindfulness in return.
4. Healthy Sharing of Opinions
5. Effective and Improved Communication

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Photo Singaporeans Collaborating

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Increase ideas increase productivity and create better team bonding
https://www.straitstimes.com/forum/letters-in-print/collaborative-approach-brings-out-the-best-in-all

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Time flies! It's August, Singapore's birthday month which means there's going to be spectacular fireworks, light installations, National Day festivities happening in different parts of Singapore, and listening to your neighbours crooning to Home for the umpteen times. But that's not all, our local artists and art groups have developed programmes for you to enjoy from the comfort of your own home throughout the month. Let's make it a meaningful and fun celebration in spite of the pandemic we're living in!

Enjoy #SGCultureAnywhere this long weekend with an interesting line-up of music, games, virtual exhibitions and even up your selfie game with interactive AR filters!

1. Share Singapore's Heritage and C ulture with AR filters

Take your selfie game to the next level this National Day, with these three interactive augmented reality (AR) filters on the theme of Singapore's Past, Present and Future by music producer Huang Peh Linde. Featuring a collection of original traditional-contemporary soundscapes and music, these filters are fun ways to make memories with elements of Singapore's ethnic heritage and local culture. Try out the filters at @studiotwothreemusic.

2. Celebrate National Day on Animal Crossing

For those who are obsessed with Animal Crossing, you can gather your tribe (more than 5 pax allowed) and host your National Day Party! Local Illustrator Aida Sa'ad has created a Singaporean-style wardrobe featuring traditional ethnic costumes, Singapore Airlines Kebaya and even the nostalgic PAP Community Foundation (PCF) uniform!

Check out the designs on the Animal Crossing Celebrations Facebook page and don on your in-game costumes for an online event on 9 August, and share these photos online for a chance to win some cool treats!

3. Enjoy A Live Concert by Local Musicians - Conversations to Flinders Station

Catch the first of four new original compositions by local drummer and video artist Jeremy Yeo in collaboration with various local musicians, as a tribute titled Singapore, My Home this National Day.

The video will feature original sounds using improvised digital music effects and accompanied by video art, visuals and footage of familiar sights around us. Tune in at 8pm on 6 August on Facebook Live, or YouTube and Instagram from wherever you are. Other videos will be released on 13, 20 and 27 August subsequently.

4. Remember the People Who Keep Singapore Safe and Running

The Silent Front - Stories Around Us by Spot Pocket Opera Theatre is a four-part online musical series that features interviews sharing the struggles and experiences of frontline and voluntary personnels in social sectors, interspersed with classical music performances. From 8 August onwards, catch an episode of the series via Spot Pocket Opera Theatre's Facebook Page every Saturday.

5. You're Invited to Co-Create A Thriving Singapore - A Virtual Exhibition

We're sure you would have heard a lot about Singapore's Smart Nation initiative, aside from improving livelihoods, monitoring environment sustainability, what are the possibilities that technology and data can bring to bridge human connections and enhance our wellbeing for a "Thriving Singapore"?

Share your vision of a "Thriving Singapore" here at www.thrivingsingapore.com before 31 August 2020 and stand a chance to get your symbol picked as an inspiration for this virtual exhibition on 10 October 2020. 15 items/symbols that are representative of what it means to be a "Thriving Singapore" will be crowdsourced from the public and used by 14 artists, alongside with ALH Studio and Creativesatwork to create new collaborative digital artworks.

Last but not least, stay tuned for special guest musicians and dancers for a Thriving Singapore Night!

These projects are supported by the National Arts Council's Digital Presentation Grant for the Arts, as part of the #SGCultureAnywhere campaign to bring together the best of Singapore arts and culture digital offerings to be enjoyed and experienced, anytime and anywhere.

Digital Presentation Grant for the Arts

As part of the Digitalisation Fund, the Digital Presentation Grant for the Arts (DPG) aims to support efforts by artists and arts organisations to present their work in digital form or via digital mediums, during this COVID-19 period. Through the grant, NAC aims to create work opportunities for arts practitioners while at the same time, develop industry capabilities in producing digital arts content.

If you're a budding digital artist, check out the Digital Presentation Grant for the Arts (DPG) on NAC website for more information.

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Singapore: Celebrate Singapore's National Day 2020 Digitally With Local Artists

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Time flies! It's August, Singapore's birthday month which means there's going to be spectacular fireworks, light installations, National Day festivities happening in different parts of Singapore, and listening to your neighbours crooning to Home for the umpteen times.

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Interesting Article to read

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Singapore's economic transformation from third world to first world since gaining its independence in 1965 is a well-known story of how stable governance and entrepreneurial thinking has fueled economic prosperity for this small nation. What is lesser-known is the extent to which the Singapore government has embraced design in its strategies to improve citizens' lives.

As Singapore's Prime Minister, Lee Hsien Loong, said in 2018:

"At the national level, design is . . . a core element of our nation-building. Singapore is a nation by design. Nothing we have today is natural, or happened by itself. Somebody thought about it, made it happen. Not our economic growth, not our international standing, not our multiracial harmony, not even our nationhood. Nothing was by chance."

Singapore has historically designed policies and services around citizen behaviors to effect long-term desired outcomes, from pension fund contributions to racial integration in public housing to road pricing. While these examples were not labeled as "design" then, they make up a backdrop for Singapore's continuing citizen-centric approach.

Singapore is not unique in this movement. Globally, the scope for design in government has increased, driven by pressing population concerns and maturing technologies. For instance, in Europe and the United States, cross-functional teams typically operate at the intersection of design, digital, and data to innovate policies and processes and to deliver public good more effectively. Examples include the United Kingdom's Government Digital Service and US Digital Service.

These trends make Singapore a potent source of learning and inspiration for other governments. In this article, we go behind the scenes to highlight key activities and principles that governments can consider when leveraging design in transformation efforts. We describe three examples of how Singapore used design to transform citizen-facing services-making life less stressful for new parents, improving quality of life for people with disabilities, and digitizing manual parking coupons. We conclude the article by outlining further insights on how governments can scale design capabilities beyond disparate initiatives.

Consolidating services around the important moments of a citizen's life

People often experience public services as discrete touchpoints as a result of agencies specializing in different functions. For example, bringing a baby into the world requires parents to interact with multiple organizations-such as medical service providers, financial institutions, social benefit agencies, and birth registration departments-in a short period of time. This makes an already-stressful phase in parents' lives even more stressful. What if a more connected, seamless journey could be designed to deliver the right information, channels, and support at the right time to increase citizens' peace of mind during life's critical transitions?

In 2017, the product development team at Singapore's Government Technology Agency (GovTech) was tasked to develop a tool to consolidate citizen-facing services previously delivered by different government agencies onto a single platform. The initiative, Moments of Life, sought to make it easier for citizens to discover and access relevant services during important changes in their lives by reducing fragmentation and being more anticipatory in the delivery of those services. Its first effort focused on the very beginning of a citizen's journey, taking the form of a smartphone app focused on making life easier for new parents. The app enabled users to register the births of their children, access their immunization records, navigate healthcare and childcare options eligible for benefits, and apply for the Baby Bonus Scheme (a government program aimed at alleviating the financial costs of parenthood).

Organizing the delivery of services around a citizen's journey, rather than fitting their delivery to existing processes, requires extensive interagency collaboration beyond functional silos. Singapore calls this a "whole of government" approach-one in which agencies collaborate on the basis of shared outcomes for cross-cutting problems. In the case of Moments of Life, a significant degree of interagency collaboration was a precursor to achieving the vision, with a range of agencies coming together to adjust their policies, processes, and operations to enable the product vision be realized.

The Moments of Life app enabled users to register the births of their children, access their immunization records, navigate healthcare and childcare options eligible for benefits, and apply for the Baby Bonus Scheme.

Since the release of the Moments of Life app in June 2018, it has had more than 32,000 downloads. For the next release, the GovTech team aims to target the other end of life: aging and caregiving. The Moments of Life overarching goal is to provide a suite of digital solutions for citizen well-being along critical moments "from cradle to grave."

Using immersive research to co-create solutions for people with disabilities

In a 2016 survey of people with disabilities by Singapore's National Council of Social Services (NCSS), 62 percent of respondents said that they felt neither included in society nor given opportunities to reach their potential. The study found that Singapore's people with disabilities continued to grapple with a host of difficulties in accessing public infrastructure, housing, caregiver support, assistive technologies, and sports facilities. They also continued to face challenges in the workplace as well as social stigma and bullying. That led NCSS, along with DesignSingapore Council, to put together a team to identify opportunities to improve inclusion and quality of life for people with disabilities.

Typically, government agencies approach the task of gathering citizen sentiment by launching surveys at scale to gather a broad representation of views. However, in studies aimed at unearthing behavioral insights, surveys can fail to reveal deep-seated issues and underlying tensions, as they rely overly on participants' self-knowledge, limit the scope of possible responses, and prevent probing in context. In light of these limitations, running small-scale, in-depth studies to drive deep insights can be just as important as engaging a large number of customers and stakeholders.

To understand the unmet needs of people with disabilities, the team used an immersive, ethnographic research method of shadowing a day in the life of each of 25 people with disabilities. This approach enabled the team to elicit difficult-to-articulate needs, aspirations, and barriers, which administrative data alone may not have unveiled. For example, by shadowing a visually impaired man, the team learned how important it was for him to feel psychological safety before leaving his house. It also unearthed subtle barriers felt by moderately impaired individuals with less visible disabilities in finding job opportunities to support themselves.

After gathering key behavioral insights from this method, the team organized co-creation sessions, which involved more than 140 public servants, social services and healthcare professionals, people with disabilities, and caregivers, to design solutions collaboratively. The team also created a detailed map of Singapore's social services ecosystem to ensure that it factored operational needs and collaborative buy-in into the process. This effort generated more than 30 ideas, four of which underwent implementation. These included Box of Joy (a home-delivered, personalized "package of surprises" to enable people with disabilities to learn and discover new things) and Social Combinator (an accelerator program to cultivate business ideas and harness economic contributions by people with disabilities).

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Various community partners adapted these ideas during implementation. The Cerebral Palsy Alliance Singapore adapted the Box of Joy concept at its Day Activity Centres as a six-month program of rotating weekend-resource kits for parents of children with cognitive needs. The kits used an engaging format to extend what these children learned during the week. The Social Combinator took the form of a hiring program by MINDS in partnership with three local businesses specializing in arts and crafts, drycleaning services, and hydroponics supplies. The program helped place 21 people with disabilities in jobs as full-time employees. The pilot program drove rich insights on how to support the different needs of employers that are looking to hire people with disabilities.

For the team's use of design to drive inclusivity in collaboration with public sector entities, it won an iF Design Award-an industry excellence award with a 66-year heritage originating in the German Bauhaus movement-in 2017 in the category of service design. The compiled ethnographic insights, trends, and solutions became an open source publication made available online after its launch at Singapore Design Week in 2017, enabling other agencies in the ecosystem to leverage the ideas in other projects to improve life for people with disabilities.

Taking a prototype-driven approach to building a parking app

Product development in the public sector tends to be slow, given legacy interdependencies and alignment needed for system changes and to mitigate public risks. Parking.sg, a mobile app for Singapore parking payments by GovTech, Housing & Development Board, and Urban Redevelopment Authority, demonstrates how agencies can adopt an agile, entrepreneurial culture in their way of working and to create cutting-edge digital products at the rapid pace usually attributed to start-ups and technology companies. Released in 2017, Parking.sg aimed to reduce the use of paper-based parking coupons in public parking lots. By digitizing this highly manual process, the goal was to save motorists time, increase visibility of parking spot availability across the island, and enable per-minute charging based on actual use.

The process of product development in government agencies typically starts with putting up a proposal and garnering sponsorship, with teams having to navigate a maze of approvals and red tape before even starting to work on a solution. To ensure that discussions could proceed effectively, the Parking.sg team brought a concept prototype into stakeholder meetings rather than expressing their ideas in abstract plans. This allowed team members to communicate their ideas more effectively and facilitate a clear, collective vision of the desired impact to win the official go-ahead for the project.

The Parking.sg team also demonstrated an entrepreneurial willingness to pivot and incorporate learnings from early failures rather than wed itself to the ideas presented earlier. For instance, the initial approach of using computer vision to detect cars that parked longer than allowed was swiftly abandoned after the team discovered, upon shadowing actual officers on duty, that the human judgement of parking officers far trumped the effectiveness of such a technology. This allowed them to focus on more critical, value-adding features, such as helping users monitor the duration of their parking sessions.

Parking.sg helped to reduce monthly purchases of paper coupon booklets by 70 percent.

Parking.sg is a case of agile methodology being possible within government agencies. From the engineering and hardware standpoints, the product was built on standard design and software development practices. These included:

daily stand-up sessions, meetings in which attendees participate while standing, for more focused discussions

pair programming, an agile software development technique in which two programmers work together at one workstation, to encourage divergent problem solving

setting up a continuous delivery architecture environment to achieve shorter delivery cycles for product releases in a more nimble, cost-effective manner

Much like entrepreneurs responding to landscape developments, the team took the opportunity to scale its erstwhile prototype in response to regulatory changes. When a pricing review necessitated that motorists switch to new parking coupon denominations, the resulting inconvenience of switching created impetus for the agencies involved to provide resources for the team to take Parking.sg to market for public use.

As with Moments of Life, the app was a whole-of-government effort requiring collaboration among multiple agencies, including Singapore's Ministry of National Development, Urban Redevelopment Authority, and Housing & Development Board. By February 2019, it had reached an uptake of 1.1 million monthly parking sessions. Parking.sg helped to reduce monthly purchases of paper coupon booklets by 70 percent.

Sustaining impact: Insights on supporting enablers

The three specific initiatives we highlight are only a sample of efforts that reflects a larger push to incorporate human-centered design into business-as-usual systems across Singapore's government and civil service. In the following section, we outline four further insights on the enabling capabilities and platforms required to reap lasting benefits beyond discrete design efforts.

Equip public servants in design for ongoing transformation

The Public Service Division, Singapore-a unit of the prime minister's office that oversees human resources for around 145,000 officers across 16 ministries and 60 statutory boards-has made building an agile, entrepreneurial public service an express goal in its broader transformation agenda. To this end, it set up a human-centered innovation lab in 2013 as a centralized resource to embed design-driven methodologies into policy, service delivery, and operational areas across various line agencies' needs; these methods include ethnographic research, service design, rapid prototyping, and iteration with stakeholders. The unit has applied human-centered design to areas such as housing, social assistance, population, talent and workforce, and procurement and financial data analysis by key monetary bodies. From these experiences, it has codified a common Public Service Innovation framework of how to apply human-centered design methods flexibly to suit the constraints of varying setups of the sponsoring host agencies.

At the same time, reflecting the necessity of decentralization to cater to different localized needs, a number of in-house teams skilled in human-centered design have been built in operational arms of government, including those associated with manpower, transportation, pensions, and housing development. For each of these, the integration of human-centered design into people and process capabilities has taken on different paths, befitting each agency's needs and pace of change. This shows that there is a rich palette of possible approaches to integrating design into how government bodies run their day-to-day activities.

Attract new talent profiles to the public service through innovative hiring practices

Singapore's Public Service Division is also transforming the talent makeup and skills mix across agencies to achieve the vision of an agile and entrepreneurial workforce. It is now commonplace to see specialist roles, such as product design, product management, software engineering, data analytics, and cybersecurity in government organizations. This reflects the future makeup of competencies needed by public officers beyond the traditional economics, managerial, and sector-based skills.

To attract this talent, agencies have had to innovate their talent norms and practices. For example, as an addition to long-term employment contracts, GovTech created the Smart Nation Fellowship Programme. This initiative aims to attract designers, researchers, data scientists, engineers, and software developers, including those in the private sector, to apply for three- to six-month fellowships to work on innovation projects and co-create solutions that use technology for public good. The agency's hiring process reflects a reciprocal, values-driven approach. Other than evaluating candidates' expertise, GovTech hiring features a two-way, peer-panel format to determine interviewees' cultural alignments to its "ABC" values-agile, bold, and collaborative. This is a departure from the tonality one might associate with the public sector. Hiring for cultural fit to make sure employees possess these novel attributes supports the desired organization-wide changes in the public service in the long run.

Emphasize citizen-centricity as a national priority

Two core beliefs are fundamental to design methodology. The first is that an understanding of end-user needs is critical in identifying the right solutions. The second is that solutions are more robust when they have been co-created with stakeholders. These tenets align with the Singapore government's intent to adopt a more consultative approach to policy making and national strategy formulation.

Solving the customer-experience puzzle: A guidebook for government leaders

As a result, participatory design is now a standard feature in citizen engagement, which has become a national priority. For example, from November 2017 to January 2018, the Singapore Ministry of Health convened its first-ever Citizens' Jury, a panel of 76 people ranging from people with diabetes to doctors to caregivers to professionals. These panel members responded to social media calls for volunteers to gather ideas on how diabetes could best be prevented and managed, given the behavioral needs of patients. From this, the goal was to expand solution development beyond operational healthcare policy and system levers to anchor supporting interventions in communities themselves.

To signal citizen engagement as an ongoing top priority, the government conducted a series of national conversations in 2012 and 2013 to gather citizen sentiment across a spectrum of topics. More than 47,000 Singaporeans participated in two phases of engagement. The first phase consisted of open-ended, exploratory conversations that then led to constructive conversations in the second phase based on the distilled themes. Called "Our Singapore Conversations," the exercise inspired several key national policy initiatives. These include the Pioneer Generation Package, a series of benefits for the generation that built Singapore's economy; MediShield Life, an expansion of the national insurance program; and revisions to primary school leaving examinations which now use wider scoring bands in a bid to shift the culture of education. Beyond this, the exercise demonstrated how a bottom-up approach that goes beyond traditional outreach platforms can significantly increase citizen trust.

Create funding and convening platforms to facilitate co-creation

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It is important to create an environment to support bottom-up innovations by self-organizing teams in government. Accordingly, various funding mechanisms have emerged to unlock resource and cost-sharing across different bodies in the public service. For example, the Citizen Engagement Seed Fund funded 17 projects and involved participatory discussions with some 4,500 citizens from 2016 to 2018. The Public Service Innovation Challenge, since its launch in 2017, has enabled around 305 officers to secure seed funding of up to $70,000 for their experiments, reducing the need for complicated approval processes. From this funding pool have come several useful solutions, such as a form builder for government websites to positively reduce the inefficient use of paper forms.

As is clear from the cases described in this article, Singapore has gone "full speed ahead" in applying design to innovating government services and improving end-user experiences. We believe that many of Singapore government's attributes and challenges apply to other countries' public agencies similarly aiming to support rapidly aging populations, cohere culturally diverse populations, make the most of constrained resources, and remain regionally competitive. Thus we hope that this snapshot of Singapore's experience offers a useful, inspirational perspective on the possible approaches that other global governments can take to harness design, as they shape more inclusive, responsive policies and solutions in their specific contexts.

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How Singapore is harnessing design to transform government services

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Singapore's economic transformation from third world to first world since gaining its independence in 1965 is a well-known story of how stable governance and entrepreneurial thinking has fueled economic prosperity for this small nation. What is lesser-known is the extent to which the Singapore government has embraced design in its strategies to improve citizens' lives.