Difference between revisions of "1819T2 Hong Kong/Reflection/Day3"

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[[1819T2_Hong_Kong/Reflection/Day5 |<font color="#89bdd3" size=2><b>Day 5</b></font>]]
 
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| style="white-space: nowrap;width: 110pt;" | Student Name || style="white-space: nowrap;width: 300pt;" |Facebook & Instagram || style="white-space: nowrap;width: 300pt;" |Daylight || style="white-space: nowrap;width: 300pt;" |VISA
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| style="white-space: nowrap;width: 110pt;" | Student Name || style="white-space: nowrap;width: 300pt;" |WIT  || style="white-space: nowrap;width: 300pt;" |TourGuy|| style="white-space: nowrap;width: 300pt;" |Goop || style="white-space: nowrap;width: 300pt;" | Intelligent Sensing Limited || style="white-space: nowrap;width: 300pt;" |Is entrepreneurship still alive in HK?
 
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| style="white-space: nowrap;  " | Adeline Jong || Sean addressed the hot issue on Facebook’s Analytica scandal relating to data privacy. And one takeaway from his response was that he sees this as an opportunity for Facebook to improve consumers’ trust rather than a negative impact on some of their projects. This speaks a lot about the good working attitude of the people who worked for Facebook. While talking to Yang Shun, he shared that he felt that he was not good enough when he works with the best and most talented people in Hong Kong. And he mentions that many people felt the same way. This was relatable to me as I at times have such thoughts while studying in IS. After hearing that, it encourages me to continue pursue my dreams of working in the IT field  just like him even if I have such thoughts. ||  | It’s business relies heavily on the systems thinking framework to solve a current problem. He mentioned that doing iteratively will produce even something greater. I believe that it is really true and applicable when doing front end development. He also highlighted the difference between a product prototype vs a digital prototype. He advised digital prototype to do a certain number of iterations and just launch the product. I agree very much as there’s so much to gain from analyze how people use the applications/platforms and gain feedback from them like A/B testing. It is also inspiring that the whole culture is built on “be inspired by people. Design by impact.” These values drives employees to create great and meaningful works, which is my definition of a successful company.
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| style="white-space: nowrap;  " | Ayesha Aziz ALKAFF || Elaine, the representative from WIT, shows a strong commitment in finding out about where they can establish a market that face similar problems as HK. They are facing steady and consistent growth and I admire that they're not too greedy to see profit, they are smart in their decision making too. They also attempt to establish as many markets as possible, like the educators (curriculum), the children (books), and parents (consultation), || The speaker seems earnest and hardworking, passionate about startups. As the idea if tour guy is really new, it's still in the preliminary stages of development. However, it shows great promise with a solid team. As their previous idea failed regarding the accessibility of wheelchairs, they are able to learn from their past mistakes and grow as a culture. The human library is a really interesting idea, and I can see the appeal of it, especially in Hong Kong, with the tourism industry booming  || Goop was an incredibly insightful visit for me. While an anonymous social app is not as new of a concept, what they did different is encapsulate the anonymity within a closed context. This allows users to feel more confident in sharing their thoughts.The real value of money lies in internalising the ecosystem - community wallet that gives you perks based on what community you belong to. He also shared that the key to knowing community is to identify core bunch of people, in this case student union of hk. || My impression of them is that they know what they're doing extremely well. They're an educated group of founders, with much technical depth on the topic, with many of them in the healthcare field. Although they're relatively new, it is clear that they have incredible potential in the market, with a clear idea on where to target, which is the health institutions, that know the value of the products. || Not many people are into start-ups, many of the youths in Hong Kong don't even know what start-ups mean. However, it is apparent that slowly but surely, educational institutions are investing more into startups and bolstering them with the right tools and resources. This can be seen by the start-ups receiving funding and space from the university, who gets these resources from the government.
| Something interesting VISA has mentioned was voice user interface design. Unlike usually user interface where users navigate website around with navigation bar/sidebar/search bar, using voice user interface design is a whole different ball game where you map conversation flows and help users complete specific tasks through correct pathways. It is so challenging yet exciting if I will get to work on such development task in future. There are many different ways a user would make a voice command and the virtual assistant has to understand the users’ intention correctly. Contrary to FB view on separating each function such as messenger, FB for business etc, VISA is heading towards integrating all devices through a single application like wechat. As a user, I agree that there are too many apps, described as “app fatigue”, and Facebook should also work towards creating a super app.
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| style="white-space: nowrap;  " | Andrew Tay || “The technology industry landscape in Singapore has not yet matured to the the state of Hong Kong where there are ample opportunities available” || “Never go to a meeting without a prototype. It doesn’t need to be a final design. It could be a paper prototype or a sketch and have reactive feedback from the user.” ||  “A large part of what we are doing is through human centric design. That is to demonstrate the desirability, desirable and viability of the product.”
 
  
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| style="white-space: nowrap;  " | Bernadine LYE Su Hui || The company effectively studied and realised the gaps in the market- low birth rates and  parents spending less time with children, creating an effective solution to facilitate language learning for children.  || “Human library” is an interesting concept I have never heard of before. Tourguy’s product is a great example of adapting existing concepts to different industries (in this case, travel).  || Goop’s product is a blend of multiple social platforms by encapsulating anonymity in a community context. Goop’s plans to venture into the Indonesian market is an interesting move backed by the youth of the social media market in Indonesia. In social media censorship, it is interesting to note how Goop manages to Balance privacy protection and content censorship on the platform by using community reporting.  || It was interesting to see the real life applications of IDP used by the company in multi-prototyping with a 2-phase prototype (wrist/wrist+fingers). The company’s BP monitoring product is innovative and timely, especially with the rise in wearable devices. In Singapore, this could be useful in monitoring for Smart Healthcare - a step towards our Smart Nation initiative.  || Co-working spaces, such as iDendron (HKU) and Pi Centre (CUHK) are popular launch pads for aspiring entrepreneurs to afford workspaces at a low cost. Also, with internet and technology nowadays, the presence of physical infrastructure may not be as necessary. The Hong Kong government also recognizes the trend of doing startups and have been promoting startups for more than 5 years. Government and private funding is also available for Hong Kong startups, providing opportunities for entrepreneurship to thrive despite the high costs.
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| style="white-space: nowrap;  " | Benedict Wee || Facebook is a “Vehicle that give people voice” that enable a person to express how the feel and they do projects that are more impactful that help the community and focus on finding your strengths which you are good at and tend to have more energy from it that enable you to have a higher bar which you can aim for. || Daylight does design work where you need solve needs of others which are complex, dynamic and constantly changing and i learn that “A team should never be bigger than a school bus” for a great team and not be afraid of receiving feedback from your prototypes even though you spend a lot of time on it. || Visa “Focus on human centric design” which give user the best user experience and constantly improving in innovation make VISA one of the leading competitor in the market as we “do not just enable payment but give user a better experience using them”
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| style="white-space: nowrap;  " | CHANG Jia Li || I enjoyed working on the research for WIT and I like how Elaine handled the Q&A session. She is very humble and forward looking. Given their research and trends in Singapore, I strongly believe they would be able to start their business.  || The idea of Tour Guy is very interesting and it really help people who needs help or advice. Something different from the rest! The owner is very determined and forward looking.  || Jeff is so knowledgeable and the way he handled Q&A is WOW! So much charisma! The team really know the market well and I like the idea of the app where it is anonymous and really fit the needs of the users. It’s helpful and fun!  || The market that they are focusing is very small in Singapore. The professors are very technical and highly skilled. It will be convenient for the stakeholders such as nurses and patients. Interesting solution and shocking result!  || Entrepreneurship is still alive because it is a fulfilling yet challenging journey. Even if the business fails, it is important that you do not give up, be forward looking, passionate in doing entrepreneurship and the solution must meet the needs of people. This means that a lot of research must be done before doing up the solution. Despite all the expensive pricing in housing and high living expenses, it still can’t be compared to the sense of accomplishment in starting a business.
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| style="white-space: nowrap;  " | Chantalle NG || The early childhood market is an extremely lucrative. This start up has seen the potential market and targeted it. Through the presentations, it could be seen that the entrepreneurship spirit is indeed present in Hong Kong, where many young companies are looking out for potential markets/ service gaps and creating a business to meet these needs. It was a good interaction to exchange views on how the image of Hong Kong is in the eyes of Singaporeans, and I think such research is necessary before penetrating into a new market.  || It is nice to see start ups creating new services for people with disabilities. The team has brainstormed many different ideas before finally deciding on one. Which I feel is crucial before investing time, money and effort from.  || The founders of GOOP managed to identify a gap for user anonymity. It is something that students are interested to use. Also, it is notable that even though they did not expect their app to gain so much traction, it can be seen that they’ve put in a lot of thought planning for the future. || Innovative designs created from innovative algorithms put them on the front line, gaining trust from Doctors in the field. Their products are also user friendly such as the sleep-time BP monitoring. It reflects on how quality and user-friendliness is very important:  || When your initial idea does not pan out do not give up. Case in point, only after 4 months, the company approached their problem statement from a different angle. Ultimately coming up with something that works, using the human library concept to start something new in Hong Kong.
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| style="white-space: nowrap;  " | Claire Teo || I felt that there could have been more sharing about the different business units in instagram, how these units support one another, and how they collaboratively generate revenue for the company.
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As much as we use instagram on a day to day basis, it would be nice to see what goes on behind the scene, allowing us to understand how a simple social media app that primarily focuses on photo sharing, eventually became a $35million valuated company.
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| style="white-space: nowrap;  " | Cheryl KOH Zhi Ying || Entrepreneurship is still alive because it is a fulfilling yet challenging journey. Even if the business fails, it is important that you do not give up, be forward looking, passionate in doing entrepreneurship and the solution must meet the needs of people. This means that a lot of research must be done before doing up the solution. Despite all the expensive pricing in housing and high living expenses, it still can’t be compared to the sense of accomplishment in starting a business. || For startups, it is always crucial to not fixate on your initial business idea and prototype, but to remain open to feedback from market validation. || To have a successful social startup, you need not be good at technology, but rather know how people make communication, and be able to identify the core bunch of users.  || When introducing niche use products, one should try to leverage on existing common smartwear to ease adoption. || Despite the high cost of living in Hong Kong, many are still interested in starting their own business, as evident from the high number of organic startup applications in CUHK and HKU. This is as students enjoy the freedom that comes with being their own boss, and desire being able to earn their own income through their own efforts.
<br /> One thing that i find very interesting was how facebook values the welfare of their employees. Simple thing like providing lunch for them allows them to better focus on their work such that when these employees come to work, the only thing they have to put their mind on is their work, and the rest of the things are well taken care by Facebook. - I wouldn’t be surprised if this is one of the main reasons why Facebook employees are highly efficient.
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I personally enjoyed the panel discussion as it allows us to dive deeper into what the employees do on a day to day basis. On the other hand, i also do wish that people from the business units could do some sharing as well as much as technology is the building blocks of tech firms, sales and business strategy team plays an important role to grow the business.
 
Facebook despite being an MNC still retains an entrepreneurial environment for their employees, allowing them to be in control of their growth, and nurture the strengths of their employees. Shaun (from consumer market department) mentioned how typical companies conduct employee review by asking them to improve on their weakness and that indeed could not only demoralize their employees, and divert their attention from improving their strengths. (Just like Singapore’s education system - where students are supposed to be aceing all modules) Like in many companies sharing sessions i’ve attended in the past, successful founders always emphasize on the importance of having a diverse team so that the strengths of different people can complement one another, making them an A team. I feel that one of the success factors of Facebook is precisely because they grow the strengths of their employees, making them exceptionally talented individuals, which also helps to retain them in the company as people are usually always hungry for growth. (They tend to stay in a company who gives them opportunity for growth and resources to learn)
 
|| Like some of the startups, the founders of daylight started their business because of their passion but not necessary for growth. I find a similar characteristics in these founders as they usually show so much passion in the things they do, and they are usually very particular about culture. Perhaps due to the nature of the business of daylight where it comprises of a “consulting” service, it is important to have a strong culture as it will draw them the right and quality customer. Culture is something that differentiates themselves from the other companies who may be providing the same services.
 
Design thinking tool is indeed useful and i believe school has tried to teach this concept to us in different modules, such as entrepreneurship practicum and business capstone. It reflected how a simple tool if being used correctly and seriously, it can create great ideas.
 
|| It is interesting that Visa has an innovation team that works on innovative projects with different clients. It is a smart approach for Visa as it allows the company to always be ahead of the payments trends, allowing them to be integrated in the ecosystem, and being able to catch any business opportunities.
 
It is true that many always think that Visa/Master are credit card companies, and it’s nice to visit them to understand the ecosystem of the payments landscape - which i think can be further elaborated. E.g. what is payments service providers, merchants. issue bank, receiving bank. How does visa play a role in the midst of all these. All in all, interesting to know there’s many upcoming forms of payments (which im not aware of!)
 
 
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| style="white-space: nowrap;  " | Clara Chong  || People get energized by their strengths: I love what Sean said about Facebook being “strengths” focused and that it contrasts greatly with how in Asia, most workers are expected to “get better” at their job by improving on their weaknesses. It’s part of what differentiates Facebook and makes it a great place to work at! || Fail often to succeed faster: Sven shared “Instead of saying what’s a good idea? It’s better to go out there and try and fail early to succeed sooner.”  And I couldn’t agree more! Yet, between failing and the success that hopefully follows, lies mastering how to pick oneself up after multiple failures and I believe Daylight Design has done that extremely well.
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  || Innovation is in the way we look at things: “Innovation is not always about using new technology but can also be about using existing technology in different ways. “ - Natalie, Visa<br />Visa may not be at the forefront of fintech innovation but one cannot deny that they have innovated in ways that make them relevant and still, the largest payment network of today!
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| style="white-space: nowrap;  " | Debbie LEE Shan Ying || Relies mainly on foreign investment to drive profits, and it is important to conduct thorough market research about target audience before entering. Quantitative measures of determining success are important, such as number of downloads, customer usage || Important step out of your circle aka comfort zone to find out more about what is happening, do not be trapped in the bubble that you are in so that you can get fresh ideas pumping in regularly || Important to branch out to explore new products. Currently only allows for annonymised chats but will be looking into giving users identities so that the app will have identified chats like Telegram, and also the annonymised option which differentiates it from its competitors. Branching into new markets such as Indonesia because there is understanding that HK market is limited || Interesting that the doctor exhibited strong passion to develop technology and bring it to the public, not being profit focused but rather trying to solve common issues. How product pricing is done is based on consultation with medical staff and industry || It is alive as mentioned by the speaker in Goop as people would try to be their own boss, as doing so gives them an opportunity to earn way more than a fixed wage in an office job, which will hopefully help them break out of the “poverty” cycle and ultimately afford their own homes (very tough to do so here).
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| style="white-space: nowrap;  " | Clarissa Poedjiono  || “Facebook is a platform to help other voice, but not the voice itself.”
 
Since its conception, Facebook has been developed to be a platform where everyone can have a say on the internet. It has also been pushing to help the underprivileged to gain access to the information and technology.
 
The working culture at Facebook has been said to be encouraging as it is focused on leveraging on people’s strength and the individuals working at Facebook are more energized because they’re always doing what they like and are good at. Overall, the trip to Facebook was very interesting but however it can be improved if we spend longer time there so that we can explore the office in depth.
 
|| “Work with, not for”.
 
  
As a company that bases their work on design thinking, Daylight Design puts its total focus on the people that will be using the solutions and work closely with them to develop the best possible solutions for them. This makes it easier for them to always get feedback and iterate through the prototyping process. The company is also a strong believer of not growing for the growth sake. While they are always motivated to find the way out from the problems that the clients propose to them as long, it also has to align with their goal regardless what kind of problems they are. Overall, as someone who has always been wanting to see how design thinking is used in a company, I found the visit to be exciting and interesting.  
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| style="white-space: nowrap;  " | Derrick LEE Ming Yang || WE invest in CHILDREN'S TOMORROW. can only differentiate themselves from a childcare centre by curriculum. no special or unique tech. ||  Very similar to professor hwee xian/pink's project on mapping wheelchair friendly routes in Singapore. Recommended to look into smart BFA's way of crowd sourcing help by attaching sensors to wheelchairs of participants. || successfully built something that user wants. Classic example of success via luck. Biz model can look into allowing students to find house mates/sublet houses/rent houses. Can be a way to monetize also. || Cool technology, planning to use humanity tendency to give meaning out of convenience. E.g. people measuring heart rate to keep track of weight loss. They want people to start measuring BP on the go. || increase in cost of living will definitely put off the idea of starting up on your own. good way to filter out who are the ones who are truly interested and inspired to create something on their own vs those who wants to be a founder just for namesake. true entrepreneurs will go out of their way to fund themselves and their product.
||“Some people may know us for different things. But what we are actually a payment technology company and we don’t issue cards.
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Visa has long been known as a payment mode for decades but not so many people know what they’re doing in reality. Visa’s clients are banks and merchants. So what it provides to its clients are solutions to enable their clients to transact securely and promptly. Visa has also been innovating in ways to make this possible through different kinds of means and leverages on IoT and token to serve this purpose. Not forgetting that they are big on security and their security has never been breached in the last half of the century. Overall, the trip was eye opening to me such that I know that Visa is doing more than just a payment gateway but so many other cool stuff but however the visit can be improved if the company was able to explain more on the Visa technology in broad rather than focusing on retail technology only in the presentation.  
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| style="white-space: nowrap;  " | Gary CHUA Rongjie || The company has a lot of potential. Especially using AI and analytics to provide data on language assessment. This will allow competitive societies like HK and SG to fine tune early childhood education.  || Human libraries is quite an innovation, especially focusing on helping the society. As HK is an ageing population, having an app to crowdsource volunteers is unique.  || Although the founder mentioned that money wasn’t the main driver for the creation of Goop, the strategy to monetise the app and earn revenues are vital for survival. It’s interesting how they differentiate themselves by not directly competing with big players like Facebook but complement it by having university exclusivity and anonymity.  || What was most important for the founder of the company was to make theoretical studies a reality. Thus they ventured to create the prototype for their blood pressure monitor, focusing on a seamless experience and better sensing.  || The founder mentioned that start ups are hard. But it’s his passion that drives him. This relates to how entrepreneurs in HK keep themselves driven. It’s always about making the idea happen and not being afraid to fail. Through this, they’re fully invested in it.
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| style="white-space: nowrap;  " | Derrick Lee Ming Yang  || “The opportunity for development is everywhere, it’s up to the individual to take ownership for development”. I took down this quote in particular because I agree with it as a developer myself. Many times I hear friends and people saying that they can’t code or do certain things because they don’t have the resources to do so. However, I find it very untrue because If i could do the things that they wish to do just by “googling” for resources and tutorials, I don’t understand why they can’t do the same as well.
 
|| “If the same problem keeps coming back in different ways, there’s usually a larger system at play”. The point of contact gave a very good analogy regarding how the same problem always come back. I find this quote intriguing because it can be applied anywhere. For example, my girlfriend and I always fight, and I see each fight as the same problem. After today, I know that since we keep fighting, there’s usually a larger problem at hand (i.e. larger system). But question is, how do I know what the larger problem is and how do i fix it? I believe I would need advice from good old married man like my father, but his advice to me was “don’t try too hard”. So perhaps someone can help me? “Your team should never be bigger than a school bus” I believe that this is very subjective. For a startup/boutique consulting firm like Daylight itself, it could be very true. However, from a business point of view, it doesn’t really make sense. By not expanding on the team, there is only n numbers of projects that they company can fulfill. Having n  numbers of projects means they have only a fixed amount of profit. It might work for them because they’re fueled by passion. “Never go into a meeting without a prototype”I learnt the importance of prototyping when I joined a Business-IT competition called Innovate IT back in 2011. I led a team from ITE to clinch their first prize. I believe that we stood out from the other teams only because we spent the time to actually develop a prototype, which impressed the panel of judges.
 
|| “New ways to pay are emerging to meet consumer and retailer needs”. The use cases and possibilities of blockchain and tokens are endless. However, one must note that many times the media portray these technology as disruptive and a “scam”. But we must not forget that those are the black sheep misusing the technology. There’s a saying that the solution to money laundering is through blockchain. Perhaps in the near future, we’ll see the true power of blockchain.
 
  
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| style="white-space: nowrap;  " | GOH Jin Qiang || Cognitive assessment helps to improve WIT current education solutions by having worldwide positive education exposure and understanding their student learning curve. || The reason to startup is you want to chase after your own dreams. By doing so, you must be passionate in the things you do.  || By segmenting customer needs allow Goop to have a clearer focus and create a unique experience in their application. All in all, dream big, start small, act now. || Commercialising a research or an idea require more than just a viable product. It’s important to understand the profile of the marsket segment rather than just trying to solve a problem. || Although, it is important to have a financial backing for any startups, Hong Kong method of paving the way for startups by having mentors for consultation plays an important role in their success. Having such support allow entrepreneurs to understand other failures, learn from their experience to have a head start in the fail fast, fail forward approach. Therefore, this approach help startups to graduate from the pre-incubation faster and receive more funding to reduce their financial problems.
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| style="white-space: nowrap;  " | Eustace Zheng  || Giving everyone in the world community a voice through the plethora of products and services in the company’s arsenal.  || A business with only profits in mind is easy to achieve but a business grounded with principles and sticking to them with values is what make things meaningful. Quote: “We always ensure to match values of the customer with ours” || Enabling payments with a human centered focus and bringing in the revolution of different mechanism and methods of payment for all of VISA’s customers. Quote: “We are not simply enabling payments but we are enabling experiences”
 
  
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| style="white-space: nowrap;  " | Gwendolyn GOH Wen Hui || I think the mission of WIT Enterprise is really inspiring as they aim to equip children with bilingual skills that would help them in the future. Team 3’s research also showed a pre school called Taidii, which is the world’s first robotics for pre school that uses RFID, fingerprint, QR CODE etc.  || tour guy introduced the concept of human library. Instead of a traditional library with books, tour guy invites knowledgeable people to share their experience instead. People are able to “borrow” these knowledgeable people to ask them questions.  || Goop became popular as it a anonymous social app, hence people became more confident and comfortable with sharing their thoughts. Planning to expand in Indonesia as people are migrating from Facebook to Instagram, however it’s not a great way to connect with friends. This is a great time to expand into Indonesia where people are only starting to migrate to Instagram. Realised that creating an ecosystem is the best way to monetise the app. || Intelligent sensing mentioned things like flexible textile pressure sensor and electronic skin that provides touch sense for robots. The company however faced difficulties matching consumer’s price points and hence are focusing their target on Hospitals. || Although I do believe that being a entrepreneur might be tough due to the circumstances in hongkong that is similar to that of Singapore, I do not believe its a dying trait. We’ve visited several companies during our period of stay and witnessed entrepreneurs in co working places. It is understandable that being a successful start up is tough, but it does not mean that the entrepreneurship spirit is dying.
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| style="white-space: nowrap;  " | Felix Wu  || Today I learnt about how best to get a foothold into the valley. Referrals are the way to go and though it is not easy to get they are the best means of getting a chance. Thereafter there are a set of rigorous assessments that have to be prepared for depending on the position you apply for.  ||  In order to be a good designer, you need both a hard skill and a soft skill.The hard skill lies in being a subject matter expert in designing in different mediums. The soft skill lies in being able to synthesize feedback into insights and conclusions.  || Payment systems are getting more and more complex and companies need to adapt to the changing needs/landscape/demands of the consumers to offer better convenience.I feel that Visa could be a very interesting company to work for for me given their focus on tech while still
 
  
 
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| Student Name || Facebook & Instagram || Daylight || VISA
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| style="white-space: nowrap;width: 110pt;" | Student Name || style="white-space: nowrap;width: 300pt;" |WIT  || style="white-space: nowrap;width: 300pt;" |TourGuy|| style="white-space: nowrap;width: 300pt;" |Goop || style="white-space: nowrap;width: 300pt;" | Intelligent Sensing Limited || style="white-space: nowrap;width: 300pt;" |Entrepreneurship
 
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| style="white-space: nowrap;  " | Goh Jia Yi Timothy  || FB: Diversity of culture that broaden my world view and how a young Mark Zuckerberg idea at his Havard dorm room can change the world. Through the different cultures and diverse communities in Facebook, we get to experience knowledge from across the world plus the food there is amazing! Instagram: Fun creative work environment that fosters out of the box thinking methods and styles to encourage new ideas and growth to the company! || Design thinking that focuses on consumers as a priority and knowing their needs and wants and executing them accurately .This helps to give what the consumer really wants and helps to change the world! || Internet of things is applicable throughout our life from cars to our homes and creating a whole new experiences that can be available for much more purposes such as data analytics that can help improve our lives! In addition plastic credit cards may be irrelevant to our life soon!
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| style="white-space: nowrap;  " | HO Wei Hong || If you are expanding overseas, find similarities in the overseas market to see which community you can possibly place you product in. || It's ok to fail but how you learn from it and refine your ieaa  || Identify your potential core users to know where to market your products. || If nobody does it then who? You prove your idea is worthwhile by actually doing it || I felt that it is alive as long as there are still people who have a strong passion and belief in their ideas to make a difference.
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| style="white-space: nowrap;  " | Goh Jin Qiang  || “Meetings is to update people and not for problem solving”. Any prolonged discussion/ problems needs to be taken offline for productive meeting, to maximise people concentration and prevent wasting their time. || Every successful product has to be inspired by people. Talk to people, observe them and understand their needs. Doing it right is more important than doing it better or differently. || Innovation is the key to improve people’s life. Innovation is not about doing things differently or finding new technological breakthrough. Using traditional methods or old technology can also improve user’s life and their experience. “You do not always have to find a new dinosaur to have new discovery”
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| style="white-space: nowrap;  " | HOW Zhiteng || As an entrepreneur, it is important that you aim to solve problems and create value for your customers. WIT's target audience is rather niche as there's not many bilingual countries as of now. However, I believe the trend of having a second language in other countries is a potential leverage for WIT. || TourGuy is a good example of why you should never give up. Despite failing, he picks his feet up and try again. || Goop's co-founder, Jeff, has a strong entrepreneurship spirit. He was very receptive to our questions and feedback. His spirit inspires me. || Great technology with a great research team. However, ISL should seek better channels to sell their products (i.e. through medical institutions instead of retail). This can significantly reduce the customer acquisition cost and having to educate their customers. || In my opinion, I think that Hong Kong right now is not the best place for young entrepreneurs. There are many more opportunities in other countries with a stronger support for young entrepreneurs.
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| style="white-space: nowrap;  " | Jacquelyn See  || Quote: Vehicle that give people voice from Facebook. I feel that Facebook is a successful platform in giving their users the power to share their thoughts and experiences freely through news feeds. For underprivileged countries, Facebook has projects to let them stay connected. Therefore, Facebook is a platform that allows the world to stay connected regardless of inequality. || Quote: “A team should never be bigger than a school bus” As long as you are able to get a team of expertise who are driven towards common goals and are able to work well with one another, strength can overcome its size. || Although Visa is a company that connects people every day through innovative payment solutions, it holds rich transaction data that many companies need to make analytic decisions on customer purchases. It was interesting for me to learn that Visa has also worked with other companies by using their transaction data to come up with campaign measurement tools for advertisers.
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| style="white-space: nowrap;  " | LIM Yi Bin || Research is meaningless without proper application of new found knowledge || Countless failures create a wealth of experience for you to rely on. || In the creation of a product, the fastest way to create something useful would be to take a neutral stance and empathize with the users themselves. || Collaboration with industry experts may allow new start ups to gain faster traction instead of doing everything in house || As seen from our visits to the incubation centres. Entrepreneurship is very much alive and everybody wants to be the next big hit. Standing out among the competition is proving to be difficult but with support and funding from various sources, many graduates in Hong Kong are taking a step forward towards making their vision a reality
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| style="white-space: nowrap;  " | Jamie Chew  || “At Facebook, there is no such thing as stupid idea. Every idea counts.” Today, it is hard to find a single idea that has not been thought of. Many times, we place unnecessary pressure on ourselves to come up with the best idea, and are afraid to speak up whenever we are not confident of what we have brainstormed. By dismissing “stupid” ideas, we may actually miss out on opportunities. After all, many great companies that we have today actually came from ideas which most people thought were “crazy”.  || “Don’t sit on your idea for too long, get your hands dirty and do a prototype to test out the idea.” It was encouraging to hear from Daylight that they do not believe in launching the perfect product. I too, believe that design thinking is an iterative process. Instead of coming up with the best solution, we should always push out “good enough” products quickly to gain feedback and to learn on how to be better. || “Our innovation lab is based on human-centric design principles - we design for users, like you and I.” Seeing how a large company adopts a creative approach to problem solving by putting people first, and developing innovation solutions to suit their needs is truly exciting, as I believe that the best resources are put in to create new and innovative solutions for consumers. I also feel incredibly privileged to catch a glimpse into the future of driving through its Visa-connected car prototype in its Innovation Lab.  
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| style="white-space: nowrap;  " | Mathilda NG || The company is promoting bilingualism to children and it is very useful in this day and age with globalisation. Word of mouth is very effective in order to promote any service or product. || It is a relatively new start up and the idea is bringing the concept of human library to HK. The idea is pretty innovative as it aims to address people's prejudices by helping them talk to those they would not normally meet, in this case the elderly people.   || They have a simple and interesting concept and they were able to achieve it through the understanding of their target audience and simple interface.  
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  || They have a very strong knowledge of their technology and what they are doing. The products that they have came up with is also  very useful as well as it caters to the healthcare sector. || The idea of entrepreneurship in HK is still very relevant as many see it as an opportunity to break away from the regular salary paying jobs in order to achieve something much more in their lives.  
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| style="white-space: nowrap;  " | Jared Sim  || There are many more opportunities here compared to Singapore, all the major tech companies are here. || Think about the whole system rather than just solving the problem || Enabling commerce to happen at scale
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| style="white-space: nowrap;  " | Mohammad Hazmie Bin JAAFAR || WIT CEO almost secured a partnership with one of the biggest Singapore's early childhood company called "My First School". Their progress in just 1.5 years is astounding. Their assessment criteria to track children's development must be effective. My sister is a teacher in My First School. If WIT successfully get the contract, i would love to see the change that they will bring in. || I always thought this is a brilliant idea! I personally would like to be guiding tourist around Singapore. Sharing the local experience with them so that they have a taste of Singapore in the point of view of a local. Touristy place are over commercialized and expensive. Therefore, having a cheaper idea to travel around in a country will be ideal.  || I feel that i can relate to this company the most. Their breakthrough is through sending EDM. Trying out their luck with a friend that leading a student union. I tried doing the same, but for Singapore Uni, it does not work as well. I spoke more to him after the sharing session and i realised that he have done the dirty work. "You got to have your hand dirty" said Jeff. 6 months he continuously push his limit. No rest day. Grinding for this to work and it did.  || Dr Hui and team are a group of intellectual researchers that is coming out a revolutionary 24 hours BP monitoring wearable. In my opinion, this can be breakthrough medical technology that could change how hospital nurses function in running their daily routine. When things can be automated and the BP data can be retrieved from the database, nurses no longer need to do their rounds to check on patient's BP. || I asked the Jeff from Goop about the average starting pay of a fresh graduate. He said roughly its about SGD 2.5k to SGD 5k Its pretty much like the amount Singaporean Graduate will get. However, when i asked him why he still chose this path despite the uncertainty, he said, this is the path that he is passionate about. Rental is really expensive and as result, he dare not think about building family yet because he knows that he will not be able to support them. I believe the long term goal he has in achieving his entrepreneurship journey will make him more fulfilled than just working 9-5pm job.
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| style="white-space: nowrap;  " | Jeremy Bachtiar  || We should not expect to always wait for instructions. Be proactive in learning and coming out with new idea. || “There is no precious prototype” - Sven Newman. It is better to have many rough options that just 1 good one. || Innovation is a process of coming out with original ideas that give surprises but yet is still useful
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| style="white-space: nowrap;  " | Muhammad Hafizuddin Bin ABD RAHIN || I believe that education is the most important driver towards development. WIT’s aim of getting young students to be bilingual, is definitely a good push towards further development. || The Tour Guy representative showed a lot of energy and excitement towards his idea. And even though the company has only started about 2 months ago, there have been many developments that could point the company towards success  || Goop is run by 2 very young entrepreneurs. The idea of having a community based communication tool in a form of an app is a rather simple but interesting idea. I believe that in order for them to be successful, the app needs to have more unique functions that attract and sustain users. || Intelligent Sensing’s speaker was very passionate about the wearable technology industry. The main problem that was brought up was about consumers not willing to buy such wearables at the current price. I believe that with more research and testing, the company would be able to find out new innovative functions that would appeal more. || Entrepreneurship in Hong Kong is by no means dead. Over the past few days, even though we only visited a few companies, we were still exposed to co-sharing environments where there were many companies who were very energetic and buzzing with good business plans and ideas to thrive in a place like HK.
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| style="white-space: nowrap;  " | Jolyn Yio  || Today I learned that Facebook and Instagram have amazing offices and working environments with lots of autonomy and free food. However, they do face several problems that users like us do not see. One of which is the recent privacy controversy that led to a trust deficit between users and the company.  || And at Daylight, a design firm where design thinking is the heart of the company, the whole process enables Daylight to solve their customers’ problems by always putting their customers first.  || Lastly, VISA was an amazing place to visit. The way they transform the whole payment experience by making it really trustworthy and secure. All in all, I learned that that different companies face different issues everyday and by tackling each issue, they too make money on it.
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| style="white-space: nowrap;  " | ONG Li Ting || I learnt that to penetrate into another market, it is essential for companies to perform conduct market research and select a promising market. With the acquired information, it is important to know how to convert it to wisdom and when to take action. Word of mouth plays a big part for the success of the company. Planning and advice are critical. || It was interesting to find out how Tour Guy actually connects with the disabled travelers especially when it comes to understanding the needs and requirements of these travelers. Dealing with the disabled is another aspect of entrepreneurship that is not common to see. I had a fruitful session at CUHK and coming up with the high fidelity prototype for Tour Guy.  || I had a great time listening to GOOP presentation on its anonymous messaging application. It was inspiring to find out that the founders were very determine with their ideas and executed it even though their degrees would have provide them with promising pay. The idea was really great and I hope to see it in Singapore soon! || Targeting a niche market carries a lot of risk and I learnt that in order to not fail, it is extremely important for the company to know very well of its target audiences. Be sure to know the company’s unique selling point and value proposition. Conduct niche marketing by bringing the product closer to the target audiences || In my opinion, it is still alive. We live in an era of knowledge where more and more people receive education and information/skills are more easily accessible and attainable. With the rise in digital engagement, business in Hong Kong can start to connect with people online. More companies/universities/government are giving out funds, scholarships and grants, which makes starting a business more attractive.
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| style="white-space: nowrap; " | ONG Lin Sheng || Wit's initiative of having a comprehensive products and services cater for children is something we can look at in Singapore. Perhaps they could make use of AI and machine learning to analyse children's emotions and needs || Interesting concept of a human library, having tourist to interact with locals instead of going to attractions could be a trend in near future. This reminds me of a combination of Airbnb and Tinder, the founder mentioned that most elderly are free and willing to interact with tourists but I'm just wondering if there are any communication and technology barrier involved.  || I think having an anonymous chat within your own university is great, but in SMU, we are all comfortable with Telegram and would be a great challenge for Goop if they want to convert us. I am also amazed by how they use 1 semester with 4 man team, less than $1000 and to build this start up.
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|| I can totally see the founder showing his passion on his project, using IoT to let people keep track of their health. But I personally feel that having a wearable device would be a hassle if I need to charge it everytime and if it's not waterproof || Ultimately I think new graduates would want to be entrepreneurs, but there are people who just want to play safe and work in a company while others would prefer to venture out. Entrepreneurship is still alive because the GenZ people are all about being unique and having fresh new ideas
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| style="white-space: nowrap;  " | Jonathan Chew  || While Facebook provides the platform and resources for learning and growth, one should take ownership and responsibility for their own learning, growth and progression. There is an emphasis empowering your own employees and trust in the abilities of your employees to improve themselves and the company.
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|| “We do reject some clients because we want to ensure that our values matches well with that of our customers.” In design, constant communication and goal alignment requires both parties to work together closely to achieve the solution together. || “We’re not just in the business of enabling transactions, we’re also in the business of enabling experiences.” It was interesting to see that Visa is actually exploring more than just traditional methods of payment, but integrating it to our daily lives through IOT.
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| style="white-space: nowrap;  " | ONG Yan Kai || It was really humbling how honest Elaine was in seeking opinions regarding how they should brand themselves as they enter the Singapore market. Humility goes a long way in listening to the needs of business users. We are happy to have provided them with our research findings and we wish for success in their expansion. || It takes a lot of courage and determination to persist in a start-up that tackles a social problem (helping people with disabilities) rather than a business one.  || It was very inspiring to learn from a young man of our age who has achieved significant success. Jeff shared his valuable experience in areas such as pitching and closing of deals over the phone. I am glad to have learnt from him. || A good solution in one place may not be as good in another. It is always important to understand well the demographics of the target market before bring in the product. || Entrepreneurship is certainly still alive in HK. Despite the issues that graduates face, HK remains as one of the most dynamic start-up destinations in the world. The huge support from the government and universities provide ample support to aspiring entrepreneurs.  
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| style="white-space: nowrap;  " | Moses Fam  || “Deficit of trust has impacted the ability to communicate” The issue of privacy has created an impact that has caused the trust of consumers in using facebook and as such people who used to use Facebook without the fear of their information getting lost are more wary and has such hindered the way things communicate. That is something that is important for businesses to work out. The trust is something that can be destroyed over a day but not built over a day.
 
|| “Fail early to succeed sooner” Having the need to prototype in design thinking, failure is part of the process. No matter how many failures it maybe, having to fail early would mean that through more experience , i’m able to succeed sooner. A unique perspective that i find special to me.
 
|| “Physical Retail Space is Reborn” Sometimes stepping out of the usual space is good for companies to actually move forward in their approach and their business. Just like physical retail space, with possibility of having shops coming in shops and driving towards consumers, constant innovation is important for other companies as well to continuously move forward.
 
  
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| style="white-space: nowrap;  " | Shaun John CHEETHAM || Wit provides education services for preschool children. What stood out to me was that they are looking to help kids with their bilingual learning need. This is something that I think would be very helpful in a country like singapore since most children are taught two languages in school. Hopefully they are successful in expanding their reach and entering more markets like SG. || Tour Guy’s founder was quite inspiring he showed resilience and persistence despite his failures. Showing that failing doesn’t mean that time and effort has been wasted, instead he has shown that every failure is a potential learning point. Their current idea of matching people with tour guides in the city is quite refreshing as it taps allows for more authentic experiences and friendships to be formed.  || Goop is a brave startup that’s looking to take on the giants like Facebook and telegram. They started with the novel idea to allow people to be able to communicate within their own communities but anonymously, and have succeeded in building strong communities of daily users. Now they want to monetise in a way that allows them to compete with mega apps like WeChat, their founders definitely have the passion and knowhow. || Intelligent Sensing are looking to create devices to help in the monitoring of blood pressure. They mentioned how most people measure their heart rate through wearables like Apple Watch, but the measuring of blood pressure is not mainstream even though it would provide the users with valuable data. I agree with the team that most people wouldn’t even think about recording and measuring their blood pressure unless it’s already included with other features in an easy to use item like a wearable. || Entrepreneurs in Hong Kong don’t have it easy, with a relatively high cost of living and ever increasing housing prices venturing out to start one’s own business is tricky and tough to say the least. But with entrepreneurs in most countries, being able to deviate from the norm of getting a job in a big company, requires determination and passion. From the incubators we have visited I think that entrepreneurs here clearly don’t lack that drive to create something of their own despite the risks, costs, and potential hardships.
 
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| style="white-space: nowrap;  " | Remy Ng  || Focus on whatever you are strong at, that energises you and take it to the next level || User-centric problem solving || Distribution as a differentiator
 
  
 
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| Student Name || Facebook & Instagram || Daylight || VISA
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| style="white-space: nowrap;width: 110pt;" | Student Name || style="white-space: nowrap;width: 300pt;" |WIT  || style="white-space: nowrap;width: 300pt;" |TourGuy|| style="white-space: nowrap;width: 300pt;" |Goop || style="white-space: nowrap;width: 300pt;" | Intelligent Sensing Limited || style="white-space: nowrap;width: 300pt;" |Entrepreneurship
 
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| style="white-space: nowrap;  " | Rizudin Bin Jalar  ||Opinion: I guess Eugene was right. Most of the times, we always do not believe in ourselves and think we can't do it. We should start believing and start doing!  || People always come first! Opinion: Your idea is only useful when it brings value to people! Hence it is true that people always come first cause if we never think of the users and empathize them, our ideas will fail cause the users do not want to use them.  || We have to always improve. Nothing except change is permanent. Opinion: Though Visa is a huge company, the company continues to improve and innovate to keep ahead of its competitor. Keep changing and keep innovating!
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| style="white-space: nowrap;  " | SIM Li Jin || With the changes happening to around the world, multilingualism is something that could be a huge beneficial to communication, and should start as early as possible. "we invest in tomorrow from infancy to infinity" || Setbacks will happen, and be adaptive to it. "adapt to changes" || Things go viral can result in success. "Fake it till you make it" || By chasing your passion, you would one day be able to see the outcome of it. "if nobody do it, then who do it?" || Entrepreneurship is still alive, with the support of the government and fundings that are available
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| style="white-space: nowrap;  " | Shilpa Suresh || The culture at both is quite similar and focuses on talent that is inspired and able to innovate. A quote that stuck with me was “everyone who works here really wants to make a difference. Sounds corny but that is the best way to describe us”
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  || Very interesting company. Maintaining a sustainable size to keep up the quality was and interesting and definitely logical move.Their focus on simplicity and minimalism is reflected not only in their work but also in the way their company is run. The activity made me think about how I can come up with creative solutions in my life. || Very open culture with employees being brutally honest about the quality of their product. If there’s a limitation,they’re not scared to talk about it. They’re focus on the consumer when adapting cutting edge research is something that brings immense value not only for the customer but also to the greater scientific community.
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| style="white-space: nowrap;  " | Stanley LIN Weijie || Could be a potential trending idea for young Singaporeans couple. Moving towards the digital age, being able to know the progression of our children will help put parents at ease || If it works, it would be a brilliant idea as it helps to create job opportunities in Singapore. Like GrabFood and Grab drivers where they leverage on normal people to provide their services. This would help to keep the overall fixed cost low.  || Easily duplicated concepts/idea with a unique point of anonymous chat. Currently they are only surviving on advertisers. However if they would expand, they might face intense competition with ten cents, QQ and WeChat. || Innovative idea to keep track of an individual’s health. However, pricing might be an issue if R&D cost are too high. E.g. not every Singaporeans owns an Apple Watch which cost at least $1,000!  || Hong Kong standards of living is generally higher as compared to Singapore. Therefore, it is not easy to be an entrepreneur as failure is not an option. However, if hk governments were to heavily fund new startup just like how Singapore’s governments did. It should not be an issue for new entrepreneurs
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| style="white-space: nowrap;  " | Tan Jian Hua ||Instagram - Instagram to me is about expressing oneself, and appreciating the strengths and weaknesses of others. Today’s visit to Instagram was fun and memorable as I discovered that Instagram has many ways of motivating their employees, through smart working spaces and free food and drinks for their employees.
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| style="white-space: nowrap;  " | SZE Shao Tang || Great concept but kids this young need the face to face interaction to learn more organically || We will iterate as many times as we need until our business works || Hong Kong seems to have a lower resistance to new social media platforms than Singapore, seeing how fast the adoption rate was for Goop. In SMU, groups like askSMU and Buffet Clearers seem to fill in this demand but perhaps the idea could be used for companies to strengthen bonding and create flatter power structures by allowing employees to interact without fear of offending bosses || This company shows us that making a product and commercialising are 2 different challenges altogether. For example, would elderly people want to wear watches? Perhaps products should be developed by considering the user first || Entrepreneurship is well and alive because from today's visits and from movements such as Occupy, there is a sense of idealism among Hong Kong youths amid growing economic and political challenges to make life better for their generation
Facebook - Facebook came across to me as a company that cares a lot about their employees, allowing them to excel in their field of expertise. For instance, software engineers are able to work from home on wednesdays.
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|| Design thinking opened my eyes to the endless possibilities of designing a product or system. A person’s view may be differing from another person. It is in this diversity which contributes to the process of design thinking || Age old systems from centuries ago can be improved on through the use of modern day technology. The vast applications of these modern technologies is up to our creativity and intuition, and the possibilities are endless.
 
 
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| style="white-space: nowrap;  " | Tan Ming Sheng  || Facebook - Be sure that we pursue the right goals so that everyday we can stay motivated in regardless of what industry we are working in. At the end of the day, it is the learning process that helps us to grow and arrive at our destination. One main take away is to know exactly what you are doing and not just to perform a task that is require by your company, every task have a purpose.<br />Instagram - Keep an open mindset, do not have a fixed direction of doing things. Be more logical when solving problems or overcoming challenges are more important than focusing on your skill set. One main take away is to speak up among your team members because they will not assume what you have in mind.  
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|| To differentiate yourselves between your competitors would require you to set the right culture is more important than focusing your differentiated offering. One main take away is that we don't make things that are simply different or even just better, but rather we should aim for solutions that are thoughtful and appropriate for the world. ||The best way to influence your culture or client to use your product is to fully understand your customer's needs, developing a solution that will solve their problems. One main take away is that we should stay committed to build a product just for your customer and not simply introducing a disruptive technology that is fitted for all the companies.
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| style="white-space: nowrap;  " | TAY Wei Xuan || We invest in tomorrow. From infancy to infinity. || It is important for startups to fail fast and fail often. Although Tour Guy failed their first idea which is to help the disabled to travel, they managed to switch their perspective quickly while still keeping their interest in travel, changing into an Airbnb style of hiring tour guides instead. || "I want to do something fun and challenging." || The current state for smart wearables may not be as attractive for the younger generation in Singapore as they value quality, functionality, and practicality for such devices. || As long as there is a great idea, and that there is a demand for the great idea, with the right timing, entrepreneurship will not be a problem regardless of location.
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| style="white-space: nowrap;  " | Tay Wei Xuan  || Thoughts: Facebook should be transparent with regards to the use of its users’ personal data as it is important for users to understand how their personal data is used so as to prevent any misunderstandings from happening.
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Quote: “Facebook is a strength-focused company. They do not pick on your weak points but focus on your strengths instead.
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| style="white-space: nowrap;  " | TEO Wei Shen || While I did not take away much from the presentation by WIT, I believe that the sector they have chosen for their business is of increasing importance and will be relevant to Singapore given Singapore's increased focus on early childhood education in recent years. || Many companies we have visited often advise the need to have passion, and TourGuy is no exception. It also does not kill to have ideas - they can be improved with each iteration.  || Goop's success, in my opinion, came because they constantly look out for gaps or unfulfilled opportunities. || The company taught me that in order for a product (especially medical devices) to be successful, we have to prove that the technology works first. || I think the dream of being an entrepreneur in Hong Kong is still alive, despite the many insurmountable challenges placed upon them. For example, they have learnt how to adapt to expensive housing by making use of the co-working spaces as their accommodation, among others.
  || Thoughts: It is important for consultants like Daylight to walk through their ideation process with their clients so that they are able to incorporate the maximum amount of feedback in the minimum amount of iterations. Quote: “Say it straight, then worry about it being great.” ||Thoughts: Innovation is key to Visa’s success as a financial services company.
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Quote: “Payments is a functional element to bring new & personalized retail experiences to life.”
 
 
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| style="white-space: nowrap;  " | Terence Yeo  || “It’s harder to communicate with distrust” - It is important to build a trust radar in times of crisis. Companies can build a trust radar through transparency, expertise, commitment and empathy. || “Launch to learn” - Learning can also be done after launching. Once prototype has been reiterated several times, the final design revision should be pushed to the market. Product can be continually revised even after product launch.  || “Transactions are everywhere” - VISA needs to move fast in the rapidly changing fintech landscape. They have to work together with hardware and merchants to constantly come up with more possibilities to enable payments. They can explore launching their own VISA token to prevent themselves from getting disrupted by cryptocurrency.
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| style="white-space: nowrap;  " | TIONG Nai Shi || Children are our society’s future and I feel that Hong Kong is a prime location for this company as their target group the young. This would definitely benefit Hong Kong children as they are multilingual, not only learning Mandarin and English like us in Singapore but also Cantonese. || When your initial idea does not pan out do not give up. Case in point, only after 4 months, the company approached their problem statement from a different angle. Ultimately coming up with something that works, using the human library concept to start something new in Hong Kong.  || Sometimes when you find out where there is a gap, or what is missing, in what is currently available in the market the results might just surprise you. Just like when the founders of GOOP got a sudden spike in new users a few weeks after they launched their app.  || First thing that came to mind when hearing about this company was that it would be in line with Singapore’s Active Health social movement. Given the increasing popularity of wearable devices such as Apple Watch etc. their product would be widely popular with the right marketing.  || I feel that entrepreneurship is still alive despite the many difficulties faced by people in Hong Kong. This can be seen with the many co-working spaces that are widely popular in Silicon Valley popping up all over Hong Kong. This can be seen also in HKU’s Idendron where only being in operation for 2 years, they have already garnered over 40 companies. From the visit we could see how many of the members in the space were highly motivated, not  paying any attention to us, or being distracted, despite us making a huge commotion when arriving.  
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| style="white-space: nowrap;  " | Wong Zhe Yin, Treasa  || Great start with Instagram and Facebook! Had the chance to take photos at the Instagram Headquarters before we moved to Facebook’s headquarter. Realised that most employees are computer science graduates. It’s inspiring that employees are able to fight for the projects which they feel are meaningful as it empowers them to make decisions. It’s also great that the work they do are strength-focused because it makes the employees a specialist in their field of work. Lastly, lunch at Facebook’s little town was great! || Learnt a great concept called design thinking where problems are solved by interviewing potential users and coming up with solutions based on those insights. My next take away is the fact that initial work hard would lead to better clients in the future. And it is important to provide the right solution not just providing different or better ones. || A digital payment vendor with clients such as banks and merchants. I learnt that their main processes consist of physical machines that process over 60 thousand transactions every second. They even have an innovation lab where Engineers work on the latest digital technologies.
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| style="white-space: nowrap;  " | YONG Fu Xiang || Working with established renowned local partners(eg: my first skool) to form credibility is key to expanding business to overseas. || Open your mind before your mouth. Change the way you look at things and the things you look at change. || Staying anonymous can help in driving content creations. || Creativity is intelligence having fun. || Students these day are driven by the passion and interest in technology, and at the same time, not wanting to work in a "typical" company for long term. To help reduce office rental cost, hot-desking in co working space provides affordable office space rental for students with entrepreneurship. Starting a startup at young age also have lower risk. In conclusion, with relevant support, entrepreneurship is still alive in the country.
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| style="white-space: nowrap;  " | Xavier See  || Facebook has pride itself as a vehicle that gives people voice, but not as an entity that has a voice.I feel that what the facebook spokesperson mentioned was a good way of summarizing facebook’s stand on their view of the privacy leak issue. As it is a platform that empowers people to make connection and stand up for things they believe in, but Facebook views that regarding data privacy issues, it is not something that is expected to actually be treated as one that is able to have thoughts and emotions and hence be able to “steal” data from others.
 
|| We are a Swiss Army knife - we have people good at different aspects. Daylight design uses a multidisciplinary team which is important in achieving its goals. It of course would require engineers to do up products for their clients. At the same time, it is equally important to have people specializing in various fields thus being able to bring the entire project together based on their own strengths. For example, Daylight design would require people who are creative to think of idea, even if that is their only job.
 
|| Visa is about the clients. Whatever products customers want we produce - e.g. customers want fridge/light bulbs with auto-payment system. It is important to be customer-centric when producing innovations as it is ultimately the customer who decides whether that product will succeed or fail. Some companies may choose to create products that they are good at or which is cheaper to produce. However, such as products often fail after a while, in entering the market, as it does not provide good solutions to customers’ problems. Thus, customers are not motivated to purchase that product.
 
  
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| style="white-space: nowrap;  " | YUEN Chui Shan || WIT strives to research on innovative ideas to equip preschool children’s educational needs and is currently looking for ways to enter the Singapore market. || If youre going to do a startup, you’ll face alot of challenges and have chances of failure.  || An social app that brings students in an university to communicate with one another anonymously. || Sensing technology (eg. electrical, optical, mechanical) and cardiovascular related physiological parameters such as blood pressure and heart rate are used to measure a human’s health condition, and also to ensure that he/she maintains a healthy lifestyle. || Founders for startups are constantly still striving to ensure that entrepreneurship stays alive by providing their idea as a free service, or through constant marketing to gain potential sponsor’s trust.
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| style="white-space: nowrap;  " | Zhuo Yunying (Kaelyn)  || Instagram - The office tour was quite brief as we only visited the photo taking booths and did not have the chance to see their office. However, the idea of including photo taking booths at the office space aligns with Instagram’s photo sharing concept.  The company visit could have improved if we can have a look at the various units in the office or we could have someone working at Instagram to share with us directly their experience in the Instagram unit. Facebook - The employees gave very interesting initiatives Facebook has done to improve the connectivity for the underprivileged. For instance, the Facebook marketplace features is a C2C platform that allows the less privileged people in Thailand to create more opportunities for themselves. One main difference in the work culture of Facebook and other companies would be the fact that Facebook focus on employees’ strengths and not overly emphasize on focusing on the need to be a all rounder by solely improving on the aspects we are weak at. Hence, “Focus on your strength and not held back on your weakness.” || The design thinking workshop on creating a perfect wallet for the users is very interactive and effective in giving us the understanding of the various steps in Design Thinking. They also shared the their company values in being user-centric, having the right design with simple solution and the need to constantly ask for feedbacks for the prototypes. What strikes me most would be the company’s intention in keeping a small company team and also being values-driven (instead of profit drive) in client selection and also the designing process of the solutions. || Visa company visit was really interesting. Despite having a long history (since 1958), Visa is continuing improving and experimenting new B2B payment technologies in various areas such as retail, point of purchase, smarthome, cars and  chatbox. Moreover, you don’t have to come up with brilliant and groundtaking ideas for innovation as innovation also includes using a common item in a different way or in a different context. The importance is to identify the gap in the payment technology and test different ideas to automate secured payment transactions.
 
  
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Latest revision as of 01:36, 3 May 2019

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HOME | COURSE | ITINERARY | ROLE | TEAM | ORGANIZATION | REFLECTION
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Day 3
Day 1

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Reflections
Student Name WIT TourGuy Goop Intelligent Sensing Limited Is entrepreneurship still alive in HK?
Ayesha Aziz ALKAFF Elaine, the representative from WIT, shows a strong commitment in finding out about where they can establish a market that face similar problems as HK. They are facing steady and consistent growth and I admire that they're not too greedy to see profit, they are smart in their decision making too. They also attempt to establish as many markets as possible, like the educators (curriculum), the children (books), and parents (consultation), The speaker seems earnest and hardworking, passionate about startups. As the idea if tour guy is really new, it's still in the preliminary stages of development. However, it shows great promise with a solid team. As their previous idea failed regarding the accessibility of wheelchairs, they are able to learn from their past mistakes and grow as a culture. The human library is a really interesting idea, and I can see the appeal of it, especially in Hong Kong, with the tourism industry booming Goop was an incredibly insightful visit for me. While an anonymous social app is not as new of a concept, what they did different is encapsulate the anonymity within a closed context. This allows users to feel more confident in sharing their thoughts.The real value of money lies in internalising the ecosystem - community wallet that gives you perks based on what community you belong to. He also shared that the key to knowing community is to identify core bunch of people, in this case student union of hk. My impression of them is that they know what they're doing extremely well. They're an educated group of founders, with much technical depth on the topic, with many of them in the healthcare field. Although they're relatively new, it is clear that they have incredible potential in the market, with a clear idea on where to target, which is the health institutions, that know the value of the products. Not many people are into start-ups, many of the youths in Hong Kong don't even know what start-ups mean. However, it is apparent that slowly but surely, educational institutions are investing more into startups and bolstering them with the right tools and resources. This can be seen by the start-ups receiving funding and space from the university, who gets these resources from the government.
Bernadine LYE Su Hui The company effectively studied and realised the gaps in the market- low birth rates and parents spending less time with children, creating an effective solution to facilitate language learning for children. “Human library” is an interesting concept I have never heard of before. Tourguy’s product is a great example of adapting existing concepts to different industries (in this case, travel). Goop’s product is a blend of multiple social platforms by encapsulating anonymity in a community context. Goop’s plans to venture into the Indonesian market is an interesting move backed by the youth of the social media market in Indonesia. In social media censorship, it is interesting to note how Goop manages to Balance privacy protection and content censorship on the platform by using community reporting. It was interesting to see the real life applications of IDP used by the company in multi-prototyping with a 2-phase prototype (wrist/wrist+fingers). The company’s BP monitoring product is innovative and timely, especially with the rise in wearable devices. In Singapore, this could be useful in monitoring for Smart Healthcare - a step towards our Smart Nation initiative. Co-working spaces, such as iDendron (HKU) and Pi Centre (CUHK) are popular launch pads for aspiring entrepreneurs to afford workspaces at a low cost. Also, with internet and technology nowadays, the presence of physical infrastructure may not be as necessary. The Hong Kong government also recognizes the trend of doing startups and have been promoting startups for more than 5 years. Government and private funding is also available for Hong Kong startups, providing opportunities for entrepreneurship to thrive despite the high costs.
CHANG Jia Li I enjoyed working on the research for WIT and I like how Elaine handled the Q&A session. She is very humble and forward looking. Given their research and trends in Singapore, I strongly believe they would be able to start their business. The idea of Tour Guy is very interesting and it really help people who needs help or advice. Something different from the rest! The owner is very determined and forward looking. Jeff is so knowledgeable and the way he handled Q&A is WOW! So much charisma! The team really know the market well and I like the idea of the app where it is anonymous and really fit the needs of the users. It’s helpful and fun! The market that they are focusing is very small in Singapore. The professors are very technical and highly skilled. It will be convenient for the stakeholders such as nurses and patients. Interesting solution and shocking result! Entrepreneurship is still alive because it is a fulfilling yet challenging journey. Even if the business fails, it is important that you do not give up, be forward looking, passionate in doing entrepreneurship and the solution must meet the needs of people. This means that a lot of research must be done before doing up the solution. Despite all the expensive pricing in housing and high living expenses, it still can’t be compared to the sense of accomplishment in starting a business.
Chantalle NG The early childhood market is an extremely lucrative. This start up has seen the potential market and targeted it. Through the presentations, it could be seen that the entrepreneurship spirit is indeed present in Hong Kong, where many young companies are looking out for potential markets/ service gaps and creating a business to meet these needs. It was a good interaction to exchange views on how the image of Hong Kong is in the eyes of Singaporeans, and I think such research is necessary before penetrating into a new market. It is nice to see start ups creating new services for people with disabilities. The team has brainstormed many different ideas before finally deciding on one. Which I feel is crucial before investing time, money and effort from. The founders of GOOP managed to identify a gap for user anonymity. It is something that students are interested to use. Also, it is notable that even though they did not expect their app to gain so much traction, it can be seen that they’ve put in a lot of thought planning for the future. Innovative designs created from innovative algorithms put them on the front line, gaining trust from Doctors in the field. Their products are also user friendly such as the sleep-time BP monitoring. It reflects on how quality and user-friendliness is very important: When your initial idea does not pan out do not give up. Case in point, only after 4 months, the company approached their problem statement from a different angle. Ultimately coming up with something that works, using the human library concept to start something new in Hong Kong.
Cheryl KOH Zhi Ying Entrepreneurship is still alive because it is a fulfilling yet challenging journey. Even if the business fails, it is important that you do not give up, be forward looking, passionate in doing entrepreneurship and the solution must meet the needs of people. This means that a lot of research must be done before doing up the solution. Despite all the expensive pricing in housing and high living expenses, it still can’t be compared to the sense of accomplishment in starting a business. For startups, it is always crucial to not fixate on your initial business idea and prototype, but to remain open to feedback from market validation. To have a successful social startup, you need not be good at technology, but rather know how people make communication, and be able to identify the core bunch of users. When introducing niche use products, one should try to leverage on existing common smartwear to ease adoption. Despite the high cost of living in Hong Kong, many are still interested in starting their own business, as evident from the high number of organic startup applications in CUHK and HKU. This is as students enjoy the freedom that comes with being their own boss, and desire being able to earn their own income through their own efforts.
Debbie LEE Shan Ying Relies mainly on foreign investment to drive profits, and it is important to conduct thorough market research about target audience before entering. Quantitative measures of determining success are important, such as number of downloads, customer usage Important step out of your circle aka comfort zone to find out more about what is happening, do not be trapped in the bubble that you are in so that you can get fresh ideas pumping in regularly Important to branch out to explore new products. Currently only allows for annonymised chats but will be looking into giving users identities so that the app will have identified chats like Telegram, and also the annonymised option which differentiates it from its competitors. Branching into new markets such as Indonesia because there is understanding that HK market is limited Interesting that the doctor exhibited strong passion to develop technology and bring it to the public, not being profit focused but rather trying to solve common issues. How product pricing is done is based on consultation with medical staff and industry It is alive as mentioned by the speaker in Goop as people would try to be their own boss, as doing so gives them an opportunity to earn way more than a fixed wage in an office job, which will hopefully help them break out of the “poverty” cycle and ultimately afford their own homes (very tough to do so here).
Derrick LEE Ming Yang WE invest in CHILDREN'S TOMORROW. can only differentiate themselves from a childcare centre by curriculum. no special or unique tech. Very similar to professor hwee xian/pink's project on mapping wheelchair friendly routes in Singapore. Recommended to look into smart BFA's way of crowd sourcing help by attaching sensors to wheelchairs of participants. successfully built something that user wants. Classic example of success via luck. Biz model can look into allowing students to find house mates/sublet houses/rent houses. Can be a way to monetize also. Cool technology, planning to use humanity tendency to give meaning out of convenience. E.g. people measuring heart rate to keep track of weight loss. They want people to start measuring BP on the go. increase in cost of living will definitely put off the idea of starting up on your own. good way to filter out who are the ones who are truly interested and inspired to create something on their own vs those who wants to be a founder just for namesake. true entrepreneurs will go out of their way to fund themselves and their product.
Gary CHUA Rongjie The company has a lot of potential. Especially using AI and analytics to provide data on language assessment. This will allow competitive societies like HK and SG to fine tune early childhood education. Human libraries is quite an innovation, especially focusing on helping the society. As HK is an ageing population, having an app to crowdsource volunteers is unique. Although the founder mentioned that money wasn’t the main driver for the creation of Goop, the strategy to monetise the app and earn revenues are vital for survival. It’s interesting how they differentiate themselves by not directly competing with big players like Facebook but complement it by having university exclusivity and anonymity. What was most important for the founder of the company was to make theoretical studies a reality. Thus they ventured to create the prototype for their blood pressure monitor, focusing on a seamless experience and better sensing. The founder mentioned that start ups are hard. But it’s his passion that drives him. This relates to how entrepreneurs in HK keep themselves driven. It’s always about making the idea happen and not being afraid to fail. Through this, they’re fully invested in it.
GOH Jin Qiang Cognitive assessment helps to improve WIT current education solutions by having worldwide positive education exposure and understanding their student learning curve. The reason to startup is you want to chase after your own dreams. By doing so, you must be passionate in the things you do. By segmenting customer needs allow Goop to have a clearer focus and create a unique experience in their application. All in all, dream big, start small, act now. Commercialising a research or an idea require more than just a viable product. It’s important to understand the profile of the marsket segment rather than just trying to solve a problem. Although, it is important to have a financial backing for any startups, Hong Kong method of paving the way for startups by having mentors for consultation plays an important role in their success. Having such support allow entrepreneurs to understand other failures, learn from their experience to have a head start in the fail fast, fail forward approach. Therefore, this approach help startups to graduate from the pre-incubation faster and receive more funding to reduce their financial problems.
Gwendolyn GOH Wen Hui I think the mission of WIT Enterprise is really inspiring as they aim to equip children with bilingual skills that would help them in the future. Team 3’s research also showed a pre school called Taidii, which is the world’s first robotics for pre school that uses RFID, fingerprint, QR CODE etc. tour guy introduced the concept of human library. Instead of a traditional library with books, tour guy invites knowledgeable people to share their experience instead. People are able to “borrow” these knowledgeable people to ask them questions. Goop became popular as it a anonymous social app, hence people became more confident and comfortable with sharing their thoughts. Planning to expand in Indonesia as people are migrating from Facebook to Instagram, however it’s not a great way to connect with friends. This is a great time to expand into Indonesia where people are only starting to migrate to Instagram. Realised that creating an ecosystem is the best way to monetise the app. Intelligent sensing mentioned things like flexible textile pressure sensor and electronic skin that provides touch sense for robots. The company however faced difficulties matching consumer’s price points and hence are focusing their target on Hospitals. Although I do believe that being a entrepreneur might be tough due to the circumstances in hongkong that is similar to that of Singapore, I do not believe its a dying trait. We’ve visited several companies during our period of stay and witnessed entrepreneurs in co working places. It is understandable that being a successful start up is tough, but it does not mean that the entrepreneurship spirit is dying.


Student Name WIT TourGuy Goop Intelligent Sensing Limited Entrepreneurship
HO Wei Hong If you are expanding overseas, find similarities in the overseas market to see which community you can possibly place you product in. It's ok to fail but how you learn from it and refine your ieaa Identify your potential core users to know where to market your products. If nobody does it then who? You prove your idea is worthwhile by actually doing it I felt that it is alive as long as there are still people who have a strong passion and belief in their ideas to make a difference.
HOW Zhiteng As an entrepreneur, it is important that you aim to solve problems and create value for your customers. WIT's target audience is rather niche as there's not many bilingual countries as of now. However, I believe the trend of having a second language in other countries is a potential leverage for WIT. TourGuy is a good example of why you should never give up. Despite failing, he picks his feet up and try again. Goop's co-founder, Jeff, has a strong entrepreneurship spirit. He was very receptive to our questions and feedback. His spirit inspires me. Great technology with a great research team. However, ISL should seek better channels to sell their products (i.e. through medical institutions instead of retail). This can significantly reduce the customer acquisition cost and having to educate their customers. In my opinion, I think that Hong Kong right now is not the best place for young entrepreneurs. There are many more opportunities in other countries with a stronger support for young entrepreneurs.
LIM Yi Bin Research is meaningless without proper application of new found knowledge Countless failures create a wealth of experience for you to rely on. In the creation of a product, the fastest way to create something useful would be to take a neutral stance and empathize with the users themselves. Collaboration with industry experts may allow new start ups to gain faster traction instead of doing everything in house As seen from our visits to the incubation centres. Entrepreneurship is very much alive and everybody wants to be the next big hit. Standing out among the competition is proving to be difficult but with support and funding from various sources, many graduates in Hong Kong are taking a step forward towards making their vision a reality
Mathilda NG The company is promoting bilingualism to children and it is very useful in this day and age with globalisation. Word of mouth is very effective in order to promote any service or product. It is a relatively new start up and the idea is bringing the concept of human library to HK. The idea is pretty innovative as it aims to address people's prejudices by helping them talk to those they would not normally meet, in this case the elderly people. They have a simple and interesting concept and they were able to achieve it through the understanding of their target audience and simple interface. They have a very strong knowledge of their technology and what they are doing. The products that they have came up with is also very useful as well as it caters to the healthcare sector. The idea of entrepreneurship in HK is still very relevant as many see it as an opportunity to break away from the regular salary paying jobs in order to achieve something much more in their lives.
Mohammad Hazmie Bin JAAFAR WIT CEO almost secured a partnership with one of the biggest Singapore's early childhood company called "My First School". Their progress in just 1.5 years is astounding. Their assessment criteria to track children's development must be effective. My sister is a teacher in My First School. If WIT successfully get the contract, i would love to see the change that they will bring in. I always thought this is a brilliant idea! I personally would like to be guiding tourist around Singapore. Sharing the local experience with them so that they have a taste of Singapore in the point of view of a local. Touristy place are over commercialized and expensive. Therefore, having a cheaper idea to travel around in a country will be ideal. I feel that i can relate to this company the most. Their breakthrough is through sending EDM. Trying out their luck with a friend that leading a student union. I tried doing the same, but for Singapore Uni, it does not work as well. I spoke more to him after the sharing session and i realised that he have done the dirty work. "You got to have your hand dirty" said Jeff. 6 months he continuously push his limit. No rest day. Grinding for this to work and it did. Dr Hui and team are a group of intellectual researchers that is coming out a revolutionary 24 hours BP monitoring wearable. In my opinion, this can be breakthrough medical technology that could change how hospital nurses function in running their daily routine. When things can be automated and the BP data can be retrieved from the database, nurses no longer need to do their rounds to check on patient's BP. I asked the Jeff from Goop about the average starting pay of a fresh graduate. He said roughly its about SGD 2.5k to SGD 5k Its pretty much like the amount Singaporean Graduate will get. However, when i asked him why he still chose this path despite the uncertainty, he said, this is the path that he is passionate about. Rental is really expensive and as result, he dare not think about building family yet because he knows that he will not be able to support them. I believe the long term goal he has in achieving his entrepreneurship journey will make him more fulfilled than just working 9-5pm job.
Muhammad Hafizuddin Bin ABD RAHIN I believe that education is the most important driver towards development. WIT’s aim of getting young students to be bilingual, is definitely a good push towards further development. The Tour Guy representative showed a lot of energy and excitement towards his idea. And even though the company has only started about 2 months ago, there have been many developments that could point the company towards success Goop is run by 2 very young entrepreneurs. The idea of having a community based communication tool in a form of an app is a rather simple but interesting idea. I believe that in order for them to be successful, the app needs to have more unique functions that attract and sustain users. Intelligent Sensing’s speaker was very passionate about the wearable technology industry. The main problem that was brought up was about consumers not willing to buy such wearables at the current price. I believe that with more research and testing, the company would be able to find out new innovative functions that would appeal more. Entrepreneurship in Hong Kong is by no means dead. Over the past few days, even though we only visited a few companies, we were still exposed to co-sharing environments where there were many companies who were very energetic and buzzing with good business plans and ideas to thrive in a place like HK.
ONG Li Ting I learnt that to penetrate into another market, it is essential for companies to perform conduct market research and select a promising market. With the acquired information, it is important to know how to convert it to wisdom and when to take action. Word of mouth plays a big part for the success of the company. Planning and advice are critical. It was interesting to find out how Tour Guy actually connects with the disabled travelers especially when it comes to understanding the needs and requirements of these travelers. Dealing with the disabled is another aspect of entrepreneurship that is not common to see. I had a fruitful session at CUHK and coming up with the high fidelity prototype for Tour Guy. I had a great time listening to GOOP presentation on its anonymous messaging application. It was inspiring to find out that the founders were very determine with their ideas and executed it even though their degrees would have provide them with promising pay. The idea was really great and I hope to see it in Singapore soon! Targeting a niche market carries a lot of risk and I learnt that in order to not fail, it is extremely important for the company to know very well of its target audiences. Be sure to know the company’s unique selling point and value proposition. Conduct niche marketing by bringing the product closer to the target audiences In my opinion, it is still alive. We live in an era of knowledge where more and more people receive education and information/skills are more easily accessible and attainable. With the rise in digital engagement, business in Hong Kong can start to connect with people online. More companies/universities/government are giving out funds, scholarships and grants, which makes starting a business more attractive.
ONG Lin Sheng Wit's initiative of having a comprehensive products and services cater for children is something we can look at in Singapore. Perhaps they could make use of AI and machine learning to analyse children's emotions and needs Interesting concept of a human library, having tourist to interact with locals instead of going to attractions could be a trend in near future. This reminds me of a combination of Airbnb and Tinder, the founder mentioned that most elderly are free and willing to interact with tourists but I'm just wondering if there are any communication and technology barrier involved. I think having an anonymous chat within your own university is great, but in SMU, we are all comfortable with Telegram and would be a great challenge for Goop if they want to convert us. I am also amazed by how they use 1 semester with 4 man team, less than $1000 and to build this start up. I can totally see the founder showing his passion on his project, using IoT to let people keep track of their health. But I personally feel that having a wearable device would be a hassle if I need to charge it everytime and if it's not waterproof Ultimately I think new graduates would want to be entrepreneurs, but there are people who just want to play safe and work in a company while others would prefer to venture out. Entrepreneurship is still alive because the GenZ people are all about being unique and having fresh new ideas
ONG Yan Kai It was really humbling how honest Elaine was in seeking opinions regarding how they should brand themselves as they enter the Singapore market. Humility goes a long way in listening to the needs of business users. We are happy to have provided them with our research findings and we wish for success in their expansion. It takes a lot of courage and determination to persist in a start-up that tackles a social problem (helping people with disabilities) rather than a business one. It was very inspiring to learn from a young man of our age who has achieved significant success. Jeff shared his valuable experience in areas such as pitching and closing of deals over the phone. I am glad to have learnt from him. A good solution in one place may not be as good in another. It is always important to understand well the demographics of the target market before bring in the product. Entrepreneurship is certainly still alive in HK. Despite the issues that graduates face, HK remains as one of the most dynamic start-up destinations in the world. The huge support from the government and universities provide ample support to aspiring entrepreneurs.
Shaun John CHEETHAM Wit provides education services for preschool children. What stood out to me was that they are looking to help kids with their bilingual learning need. This is something that I think would be very helpful in a country like singapore since most children are taught two languages in school. Hopefully they are successful in expanding their reach and entering more markets like SG. Tour Guy’s founder was quite inspiring he showed resilience and persistence despite his failures. Showing that failing doesn’t mean that time and effort has been wasted, instead he has shown that every failure is a potential learning point. Their current idea of matching people with tour guides in the city is quite refreshing as it taps allows for more authentic experiences and friendships to be formed. Goop is a brave startup that’s looking to take on the giants like Facebook and telegram. They started with the novel idea to allow people to be able to communicate within their own communities but anonymously, and have succeeded in building strong communities of daily users. Now they want to monetise in a way that allows them to compete with mega apps like WeChat, their founders definitely have the passion and knowhow. Intelligent Sensing are looking to create devices to help in the monitoring of blood pressure. They mentioned how most people measure their heart rate through wearables like Apple Watch, but the measuring of blood pressure is not mainstream even though it would provide the users with valuable data. I agree with the team that most people wouldn’t even think about recording and measuring their blood pressure unless it’s already included with other features in an easy to use item like a wearable. Entrepreneurs in Hong Kong don’t have it easy, with a relatively high cost of living and ever increasing housing prices venturing out to start one’s own business is tricky and tough to say the least. But with entrepreneurs in most countries, being able to deviate from the norm of getting a job in a big company, requires determination and passion. From the incubators we have visited I think that entrepreneurs here clearly don’t lack that drive to create something of their own despite the risks, costs, and potential hardships.
Student Name WIT TourGuy Goop Intelligent Sensing Limited Entrepreneurship
SIM Li Jin With the changes happening to around the world, multilingualism is something that could be a huge beneficial to communication, and should start as early as possible. "we invest in tomorrow from infancy to infinity" Setbacks will happen, and be adaptive to it. "adapt to changes" Things go viral can result in success. "Fake it till you make it" By chasing your passion, you would one day be able to see the outcome of it. "if nobody do it, then who do it?" Entrepreneurship is still alive, with the support of the government and fundings that are available
Stanley LIN Weijie Could be a potential trending idea for young Singaporeans couple. Moving towards the digital age, being able to know the progression of our children will help put parents at ease If it works, it would be a brilliant idea as it helps to create job opportunities in Singapore. Like GrabFood and Grab drivers where they leverage on normal people to provide their services. This would help to keep the overall fixed cost low. Easily duplicated concepts/idea with a unique point of anonymous chat. Currently they are only surviving on advertisers. However if they would expand, they might face intense competition with ten cents, QQ and WeChat. Innovative idea to keep track of an individual’s health. However, pricing might be an issue if R&D cost are too high. E.g. not every Singaporeans owns an Apple Watch which cost at least $1,000! Hong Kong standards of living is generally higher as compared to Singapore. Therefore, it is not easy to be an entrepreneur as failure is not an option. However, if hk governments were to heavily fund new startup just like how Singapore’s governments did. It should not be an issue for new entrepreneurs
SZE Shao Tang Great concept but kids this young need the face to face interaction to learn more organically We will iterate as many times as we need until our business works Hong Kong seems to have a lower resistance to new social media platforms than Singapore, seeing how fast the adoption rate was for Goop. In SMU, groups like askSMU and Buffet Clearers seem to fill in this demand but perhaps the idea could be used for companies to strengthen bonding and create flatter power structures by allowing employees to interact without fear of offending bosses This company shows us that making a product and commercialising are 2 different challenges altogether. For example, would elderly people want to wear watches? Perhaps products should be developed by considering the user first Entrepreneurship is well and alive because from today's visits and from movements such as Occupy, there is a sense of idealism among Hong Kong youths amid growing economic and political challenges to make life better for their generation
TAY Wei Xuan We invest in tomorrow. From infancy to infinity. It is important for startups to fail fast and fail often. Although Tour Guy failed their first idea which is to help the disabled to travel, they managed to switch their perspective quickly while still keeping their interest in travel, changing into an Airbnb style of hiring tour guides instead. "I want to do something fun and challenging." The current state for smart wearables may not be as attractive for the younger generation in Singapore as they value quality, functionality, and practicality for such devices. As long as there is a great idea, and that there is a demand for the great idea, with the right timing, entrepreneurship will not be a problem regardless of location.
TEO Wei Shen While I did not take away much from the presentation by WIT, I believe that the sector they have chosen for their business is of increasing importance and will be relevant to Singapore given Singapore's increased focus on early childhood education in recent years. Many companies we have visited often advise the need to have passion, and TourGuy is no exception. It also does not kill to have ideas - they can be improved with each iteration. Goop's success, in my opinion, came because they constantly look out for gaps or unfulfilled opportunities. The company taught me that in order for a product (especially medical devices) to be successful, we have to prove that the technology works first. I think the dream of being an entrepreneur in Hong Kong is still alive, despite the many insurmountable challenges placed upon them. For example, they have learnt how to adapt to expensive housing by making use of the co-working spaces as their accommodation, among others.
TIONG Nai Shi Children are our society’s future and I feel that Hong Kong is a prime location for this company as their target group the young. This would definitely benefit Hong Kong children as they are multilingual, not only learning Mandarin and English like us in Singapore but also Cantonese. When your initial idea does not pan out do not give up. Case in point, only after 4 months, the company approached their problem statement from a different angle. Ultimately coming up with something that works, using the human library concept to start something new in Hong Kong. Sometimes when you find out where there is a gap, or what is missing, in what is currently available in the market the results might just surprise you. Just like when the founders of GOOP got a sudden spike in new users a few weeks after they launched their app. First thing that came to mind when hearing about this company was that it would be in line with Singapore’s Active Health social movement. Given the increasing popularity of wearable devices such as Apple Watch etc. their product would be widely popular with the right marketing. I feel that entrepreneurship is still alive despite the many difficulties faced by people in Hong Kong. This can be seen with the many co-working spaces that are widely popular in Silicon Valley popping up all over Hong Kong. This can be seen also in HKU’s Idendron where only being in operation for 2 years, they have already garnered over 40 companies. From the visit we could see how many of the members in the space were highly motivated, not paying any attention to us, or being distracted, despite us making a huge commotion when arriving.
YONG Fu Xiang Working with established renowned local partners(eg: my first skool) to form credibility is key to expanding business to overseas. Open your mind before your mouth. Change the way you look at things and the things you look at change. Staying anonymous can help in driving content creations. Creativity is intelligence having fun. Students these day are driven by the passion and interest in technology, and at the same time, not wanting to work in a "typical" company for long term. To help reduce office rental cost, hot-desking in co working space provides affordable office space rental for students with entrepreneurship. Starting a startup at young age also have lower risk. In conclusion, with relevant support, entrepreneurship is still alive in the country.
YUEN Chui Shan WIT strives to research on innovative ideas to equip preschool children’s educational needs and is currently looking for ways to enter the Singapore market. If youre going to do a startup, you’ll face alot of challenges and have chances of failure. An social app that brings students in an university to communicate with one another anonymously. Sensing technology (eg. electrical, optical, mechanical) and cardiovascular related physiological parameters such as blood pressure and heart rate are used to measure a human’s health condition, and also to ensure that he/she maintains a healthy lifestyle. Founders for startups are constantly still striving to ensure that entrepreneurship stays alive by providing their idea as a free service, or through constant marketing to gain potential sponsor’s trust.