 We're here at ITU Telecom World 2015 in Budapest, Hungary and I'm very pleased to be joined by Dr Alex Lin, who is head of Infocom Investments. Dr Lin, thank you very much for being with us today. Thanks for having me, dear. Now Infocom is a Singapore-based company that builds and invests in ICT startups. I wanted to ask you, what are some of the key challenges faced by startups, in particular the ones that you work with? Oh, these are very interesting questions and this question, frankly, is almost universal across the world. One of the major challenges for most of the startups that we've seen is actually finding the product market fit, that means producing a product that the market wants. A lot of times, we meet startups that they're able to produce products in trying to solve a problem that only happened in their head, versus that really out in the market. In fact, we just have a conversation just now out there, having a brainstorming session and seeing how we can help all these things together. He came out to exactly the same problem everybody faced, startup, solving problems that nobody wants. And that is one of the major challenges we are constantly facing. And what are the most important things, in your opinion, that governments can do to foster growth in ICTs? Governments play a very important role, especially in the Asia context. Why do I say that? In Asia, everybody looks towards the government to do something to help them, which also means that the government is a well-respected, whether they like it or not, is a well-respected agent down there. Now, when the government is able to communicate to everybody and share with them that this is the right way to do, and everybody will listen and they will start experimenting and move towards that path. So in Singapore context, we have a very supporting government, and the government constantly advises and shows the people that it is okay to experiment. This is okay to do something and see where the opportunity lies. And because of that, we build sufficient knowledge, and this knowledge is able to share in the ecosystem, and that ecosystem begins to flourish. Now, as a subsidiary of the Infocom Development Authority of Singapore, what are some of the key lessons that you've learned from public-private partnerships that could be duplicated elsewhere? Well, we learned a lot of things through the last one and a half year when we started an initiative, we called Acceleration Initiative. Just a little bit of background about this initiative is that everywhere everybody is doing is incubation first than acceleration. That means that they try a technology, grow it to a certain stage, and say maybe there's a market for it, and then they accelerate. We flip the model the other way, and we say that let's look at the market first. So we do acceleration first before the incubation, and once you find the market fit, you can build the products. Now, this particular model has an inherent problem, a rather weakness. In the acceleration model, you don't really know who the market customer are. So you need some people to help. You don't have the infrastructure, everything is new, so you have to build it. And the most importantly is that domain knowledge may not be there. And we search around and realize that company, corporation has all this. They have the customer, they have the infrastructure, they have the domain knowledge. And now we stitch everything together, we call them corporate acceleration. Where the government, also as a funding, as well as the knowledge, put it together with the corporate, which is the private, and together with the risk capital, and we form acceleration together. And this will go quite well and be able to groom startup in a much faster way, and the startup will get a higher chance of success. From your perspective, what is the role that ITU can play in fostering the growth of SMEs in the ICT sector? ITU play a very important role. ITU is a governing body for telecom, which have a very deep influence into the whole industry. ITU is a well-respected organization where people will listen to what ITU says, and he is able to stitch and bring all the parties together. Now imagine that a scheme that ITU will be able to do by bringing the knowledge and experience of Singapore has built up to the surrounding countries, and we work together closely by spreading the knowledge of acceleration, grooming the startup, and including investment together. Now we will be able to prosper not just the region and in fact globally. So we see ITU as a very important element that we want to figure out how to work together. And finally, I'd like to ask you, what's the value for you in participating in events such as ITU Telecom World? Well, the value is huge. We started off by not knowing. As this for me, not knowing what to expect and having clean states to come here to make some assessments, make some knowledge. And what we notice is that the ITU is being agile and trying to help his membership country. And what we notice that is that that is the kind of relation that we built up. That's the network that we built up, and there is a lot of collaboration that can happen. It may not happen in the conference itself, but it's all happened throughout the whole event. Dr. Alex, thank you very much for keeping with us today. Thank you very much for helping me, too. Thank you.