# **5. Conclusion**

Notwithstanding the explorative nature of this study, the preliminary findings derived from the survey of industry actors appear to largely confirm a number of earlier findings reported in the literature concerning Singapore’s business environment for high-tech innovation and KIBS (see e.g. Wong 2004 and Wong and He 2004). The finding that Singapore is highly rated in terms of business efficiency but only moderately so in terms of innovation is also consistent with other international benchmarking indicators provided by sources such as the Global Competitiveness Report and the World Competitiveness Forum. Overall, the fact that the perception of Singapore’s chance to become an innovative city is only moderately favorable underlies the awareness of growing regional competition, particularly from China and India. Indeed, the need to become more innovation–driven vs. investmentdriven has been recognized by the Singapore government as a major strategic shift in the city-state’s future economic development as outlined in the recent Report of the Economic Review Committee (ERC 2002). However, the drive for innovation does not appear to imply a lesser need for efficiency; indeed, many of the industry actors indicated that an efficient business infrastructure is a pre-requisite for their locating their innovative activities in Singapore, suggesting a complementary relationship rather than a substitutional relationship between innovation and efficiency. Still, a few respondents did voice a need for Singapore to allow for a bit more “chaos” and to be more tolerant of non-conformance behavior (Florida 2002) to foster more creativity.

While the importance of innovation and the need to translate it into protectable intellectual property (IP) appears to be widely recognized by industry actors in all three sectors covered in our study, interesting differences can be discerned. On the whole, development of IP and its effective protection appear to be of greater importance to the high-tech, R&D-intensive manufacturing sector and the creative contents sector than to the KIBS sector. Reflecting perhaps the more tacit or process know-how nature of the knowledge in use in many KIBS activities, which are less easily convertible to tangible IP assets, the KIBS sector exhibited lower concern with tangible IP protections than the high-tech manufacturing and creative contents sectors, even though its innovation intensity appears to be higher than the high-tech manufacturing sector. Another interesting difference is that while competition in high-tech innovation tends to be global, competition in creative contents tends to have a stronger local or regional dimension.

These and other salient contrasts found between the concerns of high-tech innovators, the creative content producers and the innovation-facilitating KIBS sector suggest that the three sectors may be driven by somewhat different dynamic forces even as they share some commonalities and mutually interact. In particular, what makes a city “innovative” in terms of development of globally competitive high-tech clusters may not necessarily be conducive to making the city “innovative” in terms of the development of 51