Ivan Wong

A big part of our aspirations is to make a contribution to Singapore’s future. We want to go beyond celebrating how far we’ve come, and platform and spark conversations about important ideas for the our future”

Our first event ran in 2009, brought into Singapore by David Lim and Ivan Wong.

Dave explains this year’s theme and talks about how TEDxSingapore first began.

Tell us how you came to bring TEDx to Singapore.

I used to have this group of 40-60 people who used to meet once a month – for the main purpose of learning new ideas. People got a lot out of it and I always thought “We need to bring this to the rest of Singapore.” It was a learning group and was open to friends of friends.

I was an economist at MAS back then, and I felt that Singapore needed to move into being a society of ideas. Ideas are important for Singapore’s future. For example, ideas made Sim Wong Hoo come up with Creative Technology. Someone thought of the idea of a global airline and we now have SIA. Everything starts with ideas.

What’s different or significant about the upcoming event: ‘The Undiscovered Country?’

Well firstly, we’ve never had an event specifically on Singapore. We’ve had general TEDxSingapore, live screenings of TED Conferences, global TEDxWomen and global TEDxYouth events but none specifically on the scale about Singapore tailored.

A big part of our aspirations is to make contributions to Singapore’s future. We want to talk about ideas for the future instead of just celebrating how far we’ve come. We hope these ideas will affect the country, as well as overseas audiences. What’s important to people about Singapore? We hope to showcase ideas that answer this.

What were the past 6 years of running TEDxSingapore like?

TEDxSingapore launched on 15 April 2009. We were one of the first countries to apply for and obtain a TEDx licence. The first event was held in SMU, and for the first conference we screened TED Talk, but there was already a great enthusiasm. 700 TED fans wanted to attend, but we only had 350 seats. The energy was incredible.

After organising TEDxSingapore for the past 6 years, have the ideas coming out of the conference evolved, in your opinion?

I don’t know about the ideas evolving, since we’ve had different speakers every year so it’s hard to tell – but the community has certainly become bigger in terms of scale and we have become more skilled and more experienced about curation and preparing speakers to deliver an impactful TED Talk.

Images below: past events from TEDxSingapore