Chinawut Chinaprayoon, vice-president and director of DEPA Thailand; Jonathan Lim, director of Startup & Global Innovation Alliance at Enterprise Singapore; Stuart Rees, trade commissioner at the Australian Trade and Investment Commission; and moderator Tony Hughes, deal maker at the UK's Department for International Trade, speaking at the RISE Corporate Innovation Summit in Bangkok.GOVERNMENTS need to be agile and flexible in order to encourage innovation.
"In Singapore, we firmly believe that if the private sector and the market are doing a good job, we should stay out of it. But we should come in to address some of the gaps that the private sector is not doing, which could be because the risk profile is too high," Mr Lim said during the panel discussion.
While the authorities' stance is to not interfere with the private sector, they are able to change rules that the private sector can't, Mr Lim said during the panel discussion. He told BT separately that one of the more prominent moves that Thailand has taken is to kickstart a project called Regulatory Guillotine."We try to kill all the processes that are redundant in the country," said Mr Chinawut."Right now, in Thailand we have over 100,000 laws and regulations in place, and some of them stem from 50, 60 years ago; some of them were here since World War II. We have to change that.