Inaugural Life-Tech Award Concludes in Singapore!
From August 2024 to January 2025, Leave a Nest Group conducted the inaugural L-GRANT Entrepreneur Life-Tech Award programme. This programme was run concurrently in three countries, namely Japan, Malaysia, and Singapore. The Life-Tech Award was the first wave of the newly launched L-GRANT Entrepreneur, a grant for young researchers and entrepreneurs to support the start-up of original and ambitious research projects.
What is Life-Tech?
Leave a Nest started the Life-Tech domain of its acceleration platform TECH PLANTER in Japan to answer the simple question, “How can we enrich our lives?” Life-Tech encompasses everything from birth to death, including the growth and changes that occur in the body and mind, the relationships between people to people, and people to things. In short, Life-Tech is a group of technology that improves our quality of life and well-being. The L-GRANT Entrepreneur Life-Tech Award was created to not only gather ideas on what Life-Tech could entail, but also support the social implementation of such technology through the creation of a startup.
Life-Tech Award Kicks Off
The Life-Tech Award programme began with a kickoff session on 17 Aug 2024, with 22 people joining from the Leave a Nest Singapore office, and a combined turnout of 51 people across all three countries! Participants first heard introductory lectures by Leave a Nest communicators on venture building and Life-Tech, delivered simultaneously across the three countries through a live stream. Then, participants held a workshop to explore their own image of an entrepreneur, and what life-tech meant to them.
A screenshot of all the kickoff session participants in (left to right) Malaysia, Singapore, and Japan, with Leave a Nest facilitators in the bottom row.
Entrepreneurship Lecture Series
Selected participants then attended a series of comprehensive educational lectures on entrepreneurship, a total of 12 lectures spread over 3 days in Oct and Nov 2024. Six of these were conducted by Leave a Nest communicators, while the other six were delivered by guest speakers. These included startup founders, venture capital partners, and academics, who touched on topics ranging from business advice to research collaborations.
Mr. Zac Toh, Co-Founder of Vidacity, delivering his guest lecture in Leave a Nest Singapore's office.
In between the lectures, participants had breakout discussions to refine their ideas of what kind of entrepreneurs they would become, what projects they would start under the umbrella of “Life-Tech”, and the first concrete steps they would take. Leave a Nest communicators facilitated these discussions, pushing each budding entrepreneur to find their own vision of Life-Tech and work towards it.
Leave a Nest Singapore member Ambrose (in red) facilitating discussions with participants.
The lecture series culminated in a one-minute pitch by all participants, in which they presented their respective projects. The pitches were packed with the knowledge and ideas they had crystallised over the three days of lectures, including how their project contributes to human well-being and their proposed first steps.
Based on their final one-minute pitches, 19 participants were selected to receive a small round of funding, equivalent to JPY 100,000. They were challenged to use this funding to implement their proposed first steps, and work on their projects for three months under the guidance of Leave a Nest communicators. Furthermore, the participants were showcased at Leave a Nest events in each of the three countries. In Singapore, five selected participants joined the Hyper Interdisciplinary Conference held on 16 Nov 2024. They received certificates in an award ceremony, as well as presented their projects either orally or via poster.
The five selected Singaporean participants with their certificates, joined by Leave a Nest Singapore Managing Director Dr. Kihoko Tokue (left), at Hyper Interdisciplinary Conference Singapore.
Demo Day and Award Presentations
After the three months, the Life-Tech Award reached its climax at the Demo Day on 15 Jan 2025! Each of the 19 participants had three minutes to present the progress they had made over the implementation phase, and their renewed vision of Life-Tech and how their project contributes to human well-being. They also had to answer questions from the respective Leave a Nest communicator from each country, further solidifying their business plans.
Dr. Shawn Gao making his three-minute pitch at the Demo Day, in Leave a Nest Singapore's office.
After a tough final round of selection, three Audience Awards with a monetary incentive of JPY 100,000 each, and four Grand Awards with a monetary incentive of JPY 500,000 each were given out. These included a Grand Special Award, which also came with an invitation to the Hyper Interdisciplinary Conference in Tokyo, to be held in March 2025. The recipients of the Grand Awards were once again featured at Leave a Nest events. In Singapore, Dr. Gokula Krishnan Ramachandran was presented the Grand Award at the Global Knowledge Hub Forum, held on 22 Jan 2025.
Dr. Gokula Krishnan Ramachandran (right) receiving the Grand Award from Dr. Kihoko Tokue, at the Global Knowledge Hub Forum.
Overall, the Life-Tech Award programme was a great success, helping many budding entrepreneurs to crystallise their ideas of entrepreneurship and enabling some to implement part of their projects. Furthermore, the programme also gathered and generated many new visions of what Life-Tech is and could be, contributing to a future of higher well-being.