In this week’s Enterprise Feature, we speak to Lee Jie Yi from NUS Social Venture Lab, an initiative by NUS Entrepreneurship Centre (NEC), to promote and incubate innovation-based social ventures that have the potential to generate sustainable and scalable impact.

1. Who are you and what do you do?

Hi, I’m Jie Yi from NUS Entrepreneurship Centre, and I oversee the Social Venture Lab and any social entrepreneurship related initiatives. Social Venture Lab is a programme initiated by NUS Entrepreneurship Centre to promote and incubate innovation-based social ventures that have the potential to generate scalable, sustainable social impact. It achieves this through events, initiatives and incubation support programmes and services. My role is to help to identify and provide multi-dimensional support for social ventures, as well as to foster a culture of social entrepreneurship in Singapore and beyond.

2. What are some of the challenges you face running “pitch challenge” for social ventures?

As this is my first job, I do not have any working experience and this is very new to me. So, I told myself to keep an open-mind and learn as much as I can. I guess this is what helps me? Because as a fresh-grad, I can ask as many stupid questions as I can, and nobody will judge me. I was lucky, and I am still very lucky, people around me are very helpful and they have taught me a lot, not just the hard skills, but also the soft skills. So I’m very thankful to meet these helpful seniors.

3. What is the next Social Venture challenge that startups can be a part of?

We have recently launched a new challenge, Alipay-NUS Enterprise Social Innovation Challenge, it is a joint initiative with Ant Financial (the parent company of Alipay) to seek out the most innovative social impact enterprises in Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia, with a focus on harnessing digital technology towards building an inclusive society.

Top innovations will be awarded a grand total of S$140,000 and further support to grow their social impact.

We are currently taking in applications until 15 January 2019.

Watch the full video interview with Jie Yi from Social Venture Lab here:

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