Bangkok In his laboratory in Singapore, Massimo Alberti is working to ensure that animal testing for cosmetic products no longer has a future. With his start-up Revivo Biosystems, the founder has developed an artificial model of human skin that he can use to test how the tissue reacts to different substances.
The blood flow can also be simulated with the system, which should enable significantly more realistic analyzes than previously used methods. “I’m not interested in judging anyone morally,” says Alberti. “In my view, however, there is simply no longer any reason to resort to animal testing for cosmetic products.”
It is no coincidence that Alberti, who originally comes from Italy, brought his development to market maturity in Singapore. His career as a start-up founder in the Southeast Asian metropolis is the result of targeted research and business promotion, with which the city-state with almost six million inhabitants was able to establish itself as a leading innovation center in Asia. The openness of the local authorities to new things means that the residents of the big city are often among the first to see future technologies.
The list of experiments and market debuts is long: robots monitor rules of conduct in public parks. Driverless vehicles deliver food. Artificial meat from bioreactors can be found on menus. And air taxis are preparing for regular operations in Singapore.
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In the “Global Innovation Index” of the UN organization for intellectual property Wipo, Singapore has been among the top ten most innovative countries in the world for years – in Asia the country leaves the largest economies on the continent with China and Japan behind. Only South Korea does a little better in the rankings.
German corporations conduct research in Singapore
At Massimo Alberti’s place of work, Singapore’s inventive genius can be seen in a highly concentrated form: his company’s laboratory is on the fourth floor of the “Nanos” building in the Biopolis research cluster.
The several hundred thousand square meter facility in Singapore’s southwest was launched almost two decades ago and has grown into a district for the biotechnology industry in its own right. The individual buildings are connected via glass pedestrian bridges. The hope of driving progress through networking is also reflected here in the architecture.
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In the Biopolis canteen, which offers Malay, Japanese and vegetarian food stalls, top researchers from a wide range of specializations meet at lunchtime.
They work in institutions such as the Singapore Genome Institute, the laboratory of the US pharmaceutical company Abbott or belong to the group of scientists and engineers who develop new products for brands such as Pantene and Febreze for the consumer goods group Procter & Gamble – according to the company largest private research and development facility in the metropolis.
Of course, Apple is also represented in Singapore.
(Photo: IMAGO/Olaf Schuelke)
“It feels a bit like a university town here,” says Ronny Sondjaja, who heads Evonik’s research center in Singapore, which the Essen-based specialty chemicals company opened in the Biopolis cluster in 2018.
Other German corporations such as Bayer, SAP and Symrise are also represented with innovation centers in Singapore. “The atmosphere is very young – and characterized by mutual exchange,” says Sondjaja about living and working in Biopolis.
He has also already connected with Revivo founder Alberti: Sondjaja recalls that Alberti had come to an Evonik networking event. Because the founder’s work fitted well with Evonik’s research into the future of tissue engineering in Singapore, contacts deepened. Last year, Evonik then became an investor in Alberti’s company and has seen itself as a strategic partner ever since.
For Alberti, the Evonik investment was one of several crucial moments in his entrepreneurial career, during which he benefited from the close integration of start-ups with science, authorities and international corporations in Singapore. After studying in Milan and Copenhagen, the biomedical engineer was offered a position at Singapore’s science and research agency A-Star in 2014.
The state institution aims to consolidate Singapore’s position as a center of innovation – and in doing so expressly wants to focus on developments that can fuel economic growth in the country.
Alberti was freed at the agency to concentrate on the development of his tissue model – and got in touch with business representatives to check with them whether his work actually had a practical use for the industry.
Authorities support innovation
According to Alberti, the feedback from the companies was so positive that he felt confirmed in the plan to turn his research into a company. He agreed with A-Star to continue his work as a spin-off.
He received financial support for this from SG Innovate, a government venture capital firm targeting scientists to start their own businesses. “You feel like the country has a real interest in you being successful as an entrepreneur,” says Alberti.
The start-up culture of the city-state is, among other things, the result of the weaknesses that Singapore attests to itself. The island state on the equator has little space and almost no marketable natural resources.
However, the country managed to become one of the wealthiest industrial nations in the world by being one of the first countries in Asia to open itself up to investors from all over the world and allowing sectors such as the financial industry to thrive with comparatively liberal framework conditions.
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But that alone is no longer enough in international competition. “If we don’t innovate, we will stagnate,” Central Bank Governor Ravi Menon warned last year. One of Singapore’s great strengths is its ability to adapt proven approaches from other countries to local circumstances. “But we must step up our courage to be pioneers ourselves, knowing that some of our efforts will occasionally fail,” Menon said.
The attempt to assume this pioneering role is increasingly turning Singapore into a testing ground for international corporations. Residents of the Boon Keng district have regularly seen an orange, knee-high, four-wheeled robot with a long antenna rolling unattended down sidewalks and crosswalks around lunchtime for the past few months.
The company has developed a robot to deliver food to its Singapore office in a 10-month pilot.
(Photo: dpa)
The vehicle, which looks like a mixture of a bulky wheeled suitcase and science fiction character, is a development by the German automotive supplier Continental, which had the robot deliver food to its Singapore office in a ten-month pilot test. The transport agency and delivery service Grab also started a test a few weeks ago in Singapore, in which food is delivered with an autonomous vehicle.
The authorities expressly support the experiments – although it has not yet been clarified down to the last detail how the robots should behave in public life in order to disturb pedestrians and other road users as little as possible. A study by the Konrad-Adenauer-Foundation concludes that the regulation of innovative technologies in Singapore often follows the principle of “make it simple”.
Risks are only discussed when they actually occur. “This ex-post consideration is in contrast to the approach often practiced in Germany, of considering and ruling out all eventualities in advance,” says the foundation analysis.
Companies are looking for technical talent
Singapore’s population is therefore used to repeatedly encountering futuristic field tests. At the height of the pandemic, they were reminded to keep their distance in a park by a robotic dog made by Boston Dynamics.
Above Marina Bay in the city center, residents were able to witness test flights by German air taxi start-up Volocopter, which aims to offer regular flights in Singapore from 2024. And in the metropolis’ restaurants, artificial poultry from the US start-up Eat Just has been served since Singapore became the first country in the world to allow the sale of laboratory-bred chicken at the end of 2020.
In addition to the flexibility of the authorities, Sondjaja, Head of Research at Evonik, sees the diversity of talent as the most important reason for the success of Singapore’s innovation landscape. “The working language is English, the environment is very international,” he says. Around a third of his team of around 90 employees come from abroad. Sondjaja himself is originally from Indonesia – 20 years ago he moved to Singapore to study.
In view of the high level of income inequality and the sharp rise in the cost of living, criticism of the steady influx of foreigners has recently increased in Singapore. The government responded with stricter requirements for visas and work permits, which will come into force next year.
Sondjaja warns against making the hurdles too high. “We need highly specialized employees, which in some cases we can only find abroad,” he says. “In the end, Singapore also benefits from the fact that we bring their expertise to the country.”
More: What Germany can learn from digital initiatives in Japan, Singapore and Taiwan.