52 — Ahead of the Curve
Innovation — 53
The programme has been successful
in creating entrepreneurs. In 2016, Marine
Nexus, an e-platform for the shipping industry,
was the category winner at the University World
Cup in Copenhagen and was also the winner of
the 2015 Singapore International Chamber of
Commerce – Singapore Management University
(SICC-SMU) Innovation Award of $20,000.
Another company that won the SICC-SMU
Innovation Award of $20,000 was Homage, a
start-up focused on connecting caregivers with
elderly people seeking assistance. Homage
raised $1.7 million within six months of gradu-
ating from IIE’s Acceleration programme.
Daniel Lim, the co-founder of luxury
e-retail startup Reebonz, is a great example of
a successful entrepreneur from SMU. Daniel
started his entrepreneurship journey as a SMU
alumnus testing his first e-commerce idea at
BIG. While it did not pan out, with that expe-
rience under his belt, he went on to co-found
and launch Reebonz.
UNDERSTANDING
FINANCIAL
INCLUSION
A research team from the Sim Kee Boon
Institute for Financial Economics have begun
research on financial inclusion to under-
stand whether access to finance is good for
individuals. In November 2016, the team
comprising Associate Professor Roger Loh,
Assistant Professor Hyun-Soo Choi, Assistant
Professor Aurobindo Ghosh and Senior Lecturer
Hong Dong began gathering data to investigate
the determinants of financial inclusion and the
outcomes of financial inclusion.
The team aims to look at factors such as
wealth, income, literacy and residence type
to see how these factors determine financial
inclusion, which they define as account usage,
whether digital or physical. It will look at
outcomes such as wealth, salary, delinquency,
consumption, residence type, and borrowing
capacity to see whether financial inclusion in the
past leads to better socio-economic outcomes.
CREATIVITY
EXPLORED
In today’s modern economy, innovation is a vital
ingredient. In particular, research in strategy
and organisational behaviour has concluded
that teams are fundamental to innovation and
understanding team creativity has become an
important area of research.
At the Sim Kee Boon Institute for Financial
Economics, Assistant Professor Simon
Schillebeeckx has begun a project to investi-
gate how intra-team communication of positive
and negative emotions affects team creativity
and performance. This project focuses on
an online hackathon on the Ethereum block-
chain where participants from all over the
world competed during a five week contest
to come up with creative new business ideas
in this highly decentralised environment. The
project, entitled “Decentralized Creativity:
Team Collaboration on the Blockchain”, began
in November 2016 and promises to be one of
the first social science studies that relates to
blockchain, a technology that has underpins
cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin.
AN INDEX OF
INFLATION
EXPECTATIONS
Inflation has important and wide-ranging
effects on the economy and thus affects the
spending and investment patterns of individu-
als and businesses. However, just as important
is how individuals and businesses behave
when they expect to see inflation. To measure
this, Assistant Professor of Finance Aurobindo
Ghosh conceptualised and supervised the
creation of the Singapore Index of Inflation
Expectations (SinDEx).
Economists at Singapore Management
University, under the leadership of Assistant
Professor Ghosh, have been collecting data to
evaluate inflation expectations in Singapore since
2011. Researchers at the Sim Kee Boon Institute
for Financial Economics created two indices to
measure inflation expectations – one for one year
ahead and the other for five years ahead.
The continued development and enhance-
ment of the SInDEx is supported by the Monetary
Authority of Singapore because it complements
information obtained from the central bank’s
own Survey of Professional Forecasters.
The SInDEx surveys have been running
since 2011, and as such, have helped research-
ers identify socioeconomic, demographic,
awareness and expectations-based factors that
impact inflation expectations and the invest-
ment behaviour of individuals.
INDEXING
CRYPTOCURRENCIES
Digital payments have become a central feature
of everyday life. To most businesses and
households, this means fast transfer of funds
unlimited by geographical distance. Orthogo-
nal to such gradual improvements, however,
the evolution of virtual currencies has created
new and decentralised organised media of
exchange. To condense the market valuation
of the cross-section of the most liquid cryp-
tocurrencies, the Sim Kee Boon Institute of
Financial Economics (SKBI) collaborated with
the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin to create the
Cryptocurrency Index (CRIX) in 2015, which has
been the focus of recent econometric research.
The web page
explains
the construction of the index and gives various
links to follow up research.
The development of CRIX demonstrates
the ability of SKBI to stay at the forefront of
innovation in the fast evolving landscape of
financial technology.
INNOVATION/ RESEARCH INSTITUTES AND CENTRES
START UP COMPANY, HOMAGE
WAS AWARDED THE SICC-SMU
INNOVATION AWARD
