Rewarding failure: Home Team agency gives awards for unsuccessful projects to spur innovation
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Superintendent Sum Tuck Meng (in uniform) with (from left) HTX Q Team's lead engineer Lau Yan Ling, engineer Yeo Kiat Nern and director Ng Gee Wah. The team's Q-Crowd Counter project won the Undaunted Award.
ST PHOTO: GIN TAY
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SINGAPORE – When Mr Chan Tsan, chief executive of the Home Team Science and Technology Agency (HTX), saw the resumes of those from foreign start-ups, he was surprised by one thing: They were not shy about listing their failures.
This got him thinking about how he could encourage his organisation to embrace failure so that it could develop effective products and services.
From this, its Undaunted Award was born in 2023 to recognise unsuccessful initiatives, which the agency hopes will lead to successful ones that government agencies can use.
HTX is a statutory board set up in 2019
HTX designed the automated border control system, operated by the Immigration and Checkpoints Authority, which allows Singapore residents and departing visitors to clear immigration without their passports.
It is also developing cyborg cockroaches
As a science and tech agency, HTX networks with many start-ups
Mr Chan said he noticed a stark difference between those here and those overseas.
He said: “Overseas, every single one of them, when they try to sell their start-up, they’ll talk about how many they started, including those that failed. They would put (the failures) in their resumes.
“This was a very foreign thought. Nobody in Singapore would put their failures in their resume.”
He added that people in Silicon Valley wore their failures like badges of honour.
Mr Chan realised accepting failure and persevering were important for success, and such a culture was needed at HTX.
He said: “Innovation is quite key for a science and tech agency like HTX. We believe failure is an integral part of any innovation. Failure is the mother of all success.”
So when HTX’s chief innovation officer Ng Pan Yong pitched him the idea of the Undaunted Award, Mr Chan approved it.
In 2023, HTX gave out the first eight of these awards to recognise unsuccessful initiatives. Another seven were presented in 2024.
Award winners get a certificate and some vouchers.
Mr Ng said failure is now embraced at HTX, and its officers are encouraged to fail fast and to “fail forward”.
“Failure helps us learn how to improve. So the faster we fail, the faster we learn. This is an integral part of innovation and in helping us make an impact on the Home Team,” he said.
Other organisations also celebrate failure through awards.
Proctor & Gamble gives out a Heroic Failure Award, The Coca-Cola Company has a Celebrate Failure Award, and Nasa has a Lean Forward; Fail Smart Award.
In 2017, the director of sparkling beverages for The Coca-Cola Company’s Middle East and North Africa business unit received the Celebrate Failure Award for a failed effort to launch the energy drink Sprite3G in Pakistan.
His team used the lessons learnt to launch a more successful product later.
A project that won the HTX Undaunted Award in 2024 was the Q-Crowd Counter, which uses live camera feeds from drones to monitor crowd sizes at large-scale events.
The project, by a team of three from the HTX Q Team, was first trialled during ZoukOut 2022, which drew about 30,000 attendees.
It can count a crowd of about 2,000 people in just three seconds. It would have taken a person more than an hour to do that.
But while the system worked well in the day, the night conditions and flashing lights at ZoukOut 2022 meant it had an accuracy rate of only about 70 per cent.
The Q-Crowd Counter used an image of attendees at ZoukOut 2022 taken by a drone (top) and counted the number of people present by marking their heads with green dots.
PHOTO: HTX
Mr Yeo Kiat Nern, 28, a Q Team engineer, said shadows, light sources and reflections led to an inflated number of attendees.
He said: “Trees, reflections on water, balloons, or even fairy lights would be misidentified as heads, and could significantly contribute to the number of misidentified persons.”
The Q-Crowd Counter was updated and tested at least three more times: at the Marina Bay Singapore Countdown in 2022, the Chinese New Year bazaar at Chinatown in 2023, and ZoukOut again in 2023.
It is now more than 80 per cent accurate.
But for the Home Team Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Unit, this is not yet enough for it to be used operationally.
Superintendent Sum Tuck Meng, head of UAV operations and training at the Home Team UAV Command, said it is important to have such technologies to prevent incidents like the South Korea Halloween crowd crush
He said he is appreciative of the Q-Crowd Counter and the team behind it, even though it remains in development.
But because of their persistence, the project was awarded the Undaunted Award in May 2024.
Dr Ng Gee Wah, 60, director of the Q Team, said it is hopeful that the counter will one day be used for police operations, and that the award was encouraging.
He said: “It’s a morale booster that after each iteration, even though we didn’t meet expectations, we are still encouraged to keep improving.
“Failure is part and parcel of life. We all fail at one point or another and we have to learn to stand up and just keep trying.”
