What can be done to encourage people to become entrepreneurs?

More needs to be done to protect inventions.

Many micro small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have great solutions but once the product is in the market, many companies copy the ideas. This may be one of the reasons fewer people start new businesses.

Tat Cheng Lee

Not everyone has a financial safety net like lawyers and civil servants who "sacrifice" their well-paying jobs to pursue their lifelong passion of owning a cake shop.

Jon Peh

You need to be hungry and have that fire in the belly. Stop looking to the Government. Entrepreneurs who are successful rarely give credit to the Government.

Kelvin Lai

How to encourage entrepreneurship when government-linked companies (GLCs) grab and compete with smaller enterprises? The current procurement standards do not even help entrepreneurs to grow their potential either.

Jerri Neo

Stop hiring scholarship holders into the civil service. Let them create value for the country.

Ed Lee

Society is too intolerant of failure. The opportunity cost and absolute cost of an entrepreneurial venture is high.

Soo Geok Chan

To encourage people to become entrepreneurs is as silly as encouraging people to become doctors, barristers, surgeons, actors, carpenters, social workers, pastors, and so on.

In other words, vocations are not encouraged and promoted. They are born and discovered. They may be products of circumstance. They may result from serendipity. They may also be life callings. But they are never the result of proselytisation.

Chew Benjamin

Reduce government regulations, that is, red tape. This will help encourage entrepreneurs.

Pah Yew Heng

We do so by GLCs not competing with SMEs across all industries.

Also, look at GeBiz. Why are small companies not given opportunities to partake in government projects? Small doesn't mean incompetent.

David Lim