Nominations for the annual EY Entrepreneur Of The Year™ (EOY) awards in Singapore are now open. The awards, which was started in 2002 to coincide with the government’s focus on entrepreneurship, celebrates its 21st year anniversary this year.
“Now more than ever, as Singapore works toward recovering from the pandemic, entrepreneurs have an important role to play in energizing the economy and workforce,” says Max Loh, managing partner for Singapore and Brunei, Ernst & Young LLP.
“We look forward to celebrating the ambition, purpose and resilience of our leading entrepreneurs and the sustained impact that they are making to their business and ecosystem of stakeholders. This year, we have also updated the global judging criteria to better reflect the attributes of winning entrepreneurs that are key to driving long-term value.”
The nominees will be assessed by an independent judging panel across four globally benchmarked criteria of entrepreneurial spirit, growth, purpose and impact.
Entrepreneurs who excel across the four criteria will be honoured as winners of award titles that are designed to reflect their unique qualities or achievements. The individual who ranks the highest across all four criteria will be selected as the EY Entrepreneur Of The Year 2022 Singapore to represent the country at the EY World Entrepreneur Of The Year (WEOY) award next year.
Come June 2022, last year’s EOY Singapore winner, Dr Zhou Lihan, co-founder and CEO; Dr Zou Ruiyang, co-founder and CTO; and Isaac Ho, CIO of MiRXES will be Singapore’s representatives at the world award to compete with close to 60 other countries.
According to Zhou, a business leader should always lead by example, and be agile and fearless when making decisions, and certainly more so in trying times such as the on-going pandemic.
“We have seen how important national security was for Singapore, specifically when the Covid-19 situation started last year. If we were not able to produce the test kits ourselves, there would be a lot of waiting and unknowns. This showed us that building our manufacturing base was a right decision even though when we first started, we had many detractors and many wondered why we were venturing into so many areas.
“As an entrepreneur, aside from making sound financial decisions, it is also about taking a leap of faith, trusting your instincts, and looking at the big picture,” he adds.
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The Singapore Exchange (SGX) continues as a partner of the EOY awards for the third year. “We are delighted to extend our partnership with EY to recognize home-grown entrepreneurs, whose vision and tenacity continue to inspire us in an increasingly unpredictable world,” says Pol de Win, SGX’s senior managing director and head of global sales and origination.
“As Singapore faces a generational opportunity with Asia driving global growth and unprecedented capital flows, SGX is committed to provide an international platform for founders to profile their businesses and access global capital,” he adds.
The supporters of the EOY awards include The Business Times, The Edge Singapore and Portfolio magazine (official media partners); and the supporters are Action Community for Entrepreneurship; Enterprise Singapore; Singapore Business Federation; and SkillsFuture Singapore.
Once again, EY will confer the EY Family Business Award of Excellence this year. The award recipient will be selected based on the family enterprise’s ability to successfully balance business and family issues, grow the business and show responsibility for others through philanthropic or social engagements.
Knowledge Partners, Business Families Institute @ Singapore Management University (BFI @ SMU) and The Wendel International Centre for Family Enterprise, INSEAD, will select the winner.
The theme for the awards this year is “The Unstoppables”. The public and business community are encouraged to nominate outstanding entrepreneurs for the award at www.ey.com/sg/eoy. The nominations will close on May 9 2022.
