Tackling digital disruption: Industry transformations and workforce resilience

Across studies by universities, consultancies, companies and non-profits, concerns are growing about the impact of technology disruption on work. Singapore has also made this issue a top priority. At the 2017 Committee of Supply debates, Minister-in-Charge of the Smart Nation Initiative, Dr Vivian Balakrishnan, stressed that the “accelerating digital revolution… is going to disrupt jobs” and his top priority is “jobs, jobs, jobs.” Singapore is thus investing heavily in job creation and matching, and skills re-training and upgrading.

There are also growing concerns that we need to better track this disruptive impact, especially by AI and automation, on jobs. A 2017 USA National Academies report concluded that current tools are inadequate, and new tools are needed. MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson, who co-chaired the panel for the report, admitted that “[w]e’re flying blind.”

Hence, as Singapore journeys towards being a Smart Nation and Digital Economy, we need to able to track and tackle how this digital disruption will impact and change Singapore’s economy and society. Singapore needs to do this well so that the workforce is resilient, economy is competitive, and society is not beset by potential digital divides.

Leveraging the close collaborations between the social science, technological, and policy disciplines at the Lee Kuan Yew Centre for Innovative Cities (LKYCIC) at SUTD and SUTD on the whole, policy expertise at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy (LKYSPP), and management and strategy expertise at NUS’s School of Business and SMU’s Lee Kong Chian School of Business we thus propose a multi-disciplinary study on:

1. how Singapore can track the speed and scale of digital disruption in Singapore; digital disruption in work is defined in this study as the transformations in work and organisations that are brought about by the introduction of technology.
2. how Singapore can help organizations and their workers tackle this disruption; specifically, we will focus on how they can adopt new technologies expediently, by ‘learning’ the technology, ‘changing’ the way work is done, and ‘mastering’ the use of these technologies to increase productivity.
3. how Singapore can potentially create new jobs in a digital economy.
4. what are Singapore’s policy options to respond to digital disruption

The focus will be on two key sectors: manufacturing, and exportable services, specifically finance and banking.  They form two important drivers of Singapore’s economy, and provide a cross-section of different skills profiles – from labour-intensive to knowledge-based – of the workforce.  By focusing on these two sectors, we aim to produce industry specific findings while also generalizing our findings across different jobs.

This project aims to i) construct Singapore’s first occupation task database that will afford the ability to track digital transformation of tasks in occupations to identify potential digital disruption, ii) combine data science with social and behavioural science, and use a mix of big data, and quantitative and qualitative methods to develop a more comprehensive understanding of digital disruption in Singapore.

The results generated from this research program will be used to develop recommendations on how the government, organisations and individuals can prepare themselves for digital disruptions to maximise gains and opportunities and minimise costs. We will also mentor early career researchers and young scholars through this program.