WHAT IS THE PROGRAMME?

• The Community Business Incubator supports groups to start community-owned enterprises or multi stakeholder cooperatives that are collectively owned and democratically managed.
• Run by IPS Policy Lab to test an alternative model of how economic activity can be made to serve community needs.
• Funded by the Future Ready Society Impact Fund.
  

WHAT KIND OF BUSINESSES ARE WE BUILDING?

These are the underlying features of community-owned businesses and cooperatives that can build community wealth, create economic inclusion and improve social mobility.

WHAT INTELLECTUAL FRAMEWORKS INFORM THIS EXPERIMENT?

• Community Wealth Building: If inequality is a structural problem, then we cannot focus only on supporting individual or family wealth, but on building larger community wealth.
• Asset Based Community Development: Instead of corporates making money, or the state redistributing it to the third sector to spend it, the community itself can be a site of serious economic activity. The disadvantaged groups we want to help have strengths that can be leveraged so they are a central part of the solution that creates economic inclusion and social mobility.
• Social and Solidarity Economy: The global economy is designed to be hypercompetitive, but we create a complementary or substrate social economy that is designed for inclusion, reciprocity and cooperation. This helps those excluded from markets to participate in meaningful productive activity and supports wealth circulation in local economies.
• Ecological Economics: Economic activity should produce wellbeing from the get-go instead of creating negative externalities that are not accounted for in the ledgers. If economic activity is made subservient to community needs and within planetary boundaries, then perhaps there is an appropriate size to a business—never too large such that it exploits people or planet.

OUR TEAM

Institute of Policy Studies (Policy Lab)
Dr Justin Lee, Head of Policy Lab and Senior Research Fellow (Principal Investigator)
Dr Wong Kang Li, Research Fellow (Principal Investigator)
Cecilia Kuek, Senior Manager
Wilson Goh, Research Associate
Marilyn Koh, Research Assistant

Senior Innovation Fellow &
Entrepreneur-in-Residence
Wong Toon King

Collaborator
Darren Yong

Advisory Committee
Alfie Othman, CEO, Singapore Centre for Social Enterprise (raiSE)
Ang Hin Kee, CEO, Singapore National Co-operative Federation (SNCF)
Ang Yuit, President, Association of Small & Medium Enterprises
Chester Tan, Founder, Heritage Business Foundation
Edwin Sia, Director of Business Development and Market Expansion, Corning International Southeast Asia
Lee Shi Yan, Honorary Legal Advisor, GP+ Cooperative Limited
Priscilla Koh, Head, SUSS Venture Building