Because our businessmen & domain experts don’t talk to one another more

The next time you come across a man in a suit having a serious discussion with a geeky-looking engineer in Singapore, stop dead in your tracks, whip out your handphone and snap a picture. You’ve just captured history .

Thanks to the Singapore education system, our schools and universities have churned out cohort after cohort of excellent lawyers, accountants, businessmen, programmers, engineers, even expert test-tube cleaners for our life sciences industry – you name it, we’ve got some of the best in town!

Yet, our best-of-the-breed seem to exist in separate worlds. In primary school, we were streamed into various bands of academic excellence – peer pressure deemed hanging out with folks from a lower band as un-cool. In junior college and university, we were likely to spend more time interacting across faculties at canteens during your breaks, than working on inter-disciplinary projects. The majority of local varsity coursework continues to value domain experts more highly than ‘Jack of all Trades, Master of None’ generalists.

Couple all of the above, with a general lack of interaction between businessmen (who kept to their swanky business schools and pompous fellow students) and domain experts (we know better than those snotty businessmen) and what do we get? Yet another piece of the puzzle to the question that whysgentrepreneurssuck seeks to answer!

Because our businessmen and domain experts don’t talk to one another more, we end up with the following:

• Domain experts developing products and services with technology they love , but without market demand or sensible business models
• Businessmen selling business ideas or products without true competitive advantage, and thus having to resort to an insane amount of fluff

What can we do about it then?

• Be aware, and do not discriminate! Businessmen or not, we’re all keen on building that next big start-up, and join the ranks of Osim, Banyan Tree, Hyflux, e.t.c. Instead of exclusion, try picking the brains of that next smooth businessman you come across – you might just find a new partner for your start-up.
• Leave the comforts of your safety zone, and make contact with all kinds of people – you’ll never know when you need to invite that accountant friend of yours to be your start-up’s CFO, or that nerdy geeky class loser as your CTO.
• Keep the talking alive! Fire that email off to that cool dude you met at the last event. Perhaps Entrepreneur27, SGentrepreneur, Barcamp Singapore, Mobile Monday, etc could consider a regular combined event to allow the entire community to mingle and exchange ideas?

More ideas people?