Perched on a hillock with a commanding view of Singapore, Kent Ridge Digital Labs is the sort of place where people lower their voices on entering. Scientists in white coats gather in knots, furrow their brows in discussion and tap data into hand-held devices. The human capital we have here is just as valuable as that in Silicon Valley.
Private firms play a similar role across the Asian Internet scene as nannies to good ideas.
But in Singapore the government has traditionally presumed to know best how to rear its populace, and its technocrats have had a hard time changing their ways. We have to 'architect' how that happens. We're sort of Singapore's corporate lab. In this day and age, that means looking outside the tiny city-state for help. German neurosurgeon Ralf Kockro and his Barcelona-born colleague Luis Serra came to krdl to develop software that can enable virtual brain surgery.