Forge

Addressing the Entrepreneurship Readiness Gap

Our students are already building impressive things - in coursework, hackathons, and open-source projects. But they are missing a crucial next step.

Recent student surveys identify entrepreneurship readiness as a significant gap, ranking it lowest among assessed life skills. Forge is intended to bridge this deficiency through hands-on experience, allowing students to develop these vital skills by working on real-world projects.

Just as doctors are trained in a teaching hospital - learning by doing real, consequential work under expert supervision - computing students need an equivalent experience. Classrooms and internships only go so far; they don't teach a student how to take a project from the first conversation with a business to software that is actually running and making a difference a year later.

The establishment of such an institution is proposed. Forge would be a center owned and managed by SoC.

Here is why this approach is different:

• It is open to all: Forge will not be an exclusive club or a startup spin-out. It will be open to every student in our school.
• Merit is proven, not promised: In the past, we had to rely on pitches or plans because building software was expensive and slow. That's no longer true. Today, a student can build a working prototype in the time it once took to write a proposal. So, we will raise the bar: entry and advancement into Forge will be earned by showing us software that actually works or significant contributions to real-world projects.
• Real impact: Forge students will partner with real businesses to identify their actual needs and build custom solutions. They won't just be learning technology; they will be learning how software solves problems across every industry, from logistics to manufacturing - not just within tech companies.

We are not looking for intentions or plans, and trying to pick winners; we are developing builders who can deliver, through experience. Forge will be the place where we give them the chance to develop and prove themselves.

The Way Teaching Hospitals Train Doctors

Every project at Forge is a high-stakes, real-world engagement. Students are paired with small businesses that understand their own operations but lack technical expertise. The student takes full ownership of the lifecycle: analyzing the problem, designing the solution, building it, and putting it into production.

Crucially, they don't just hand over the project and leave; Forge maintains what we build. This ensures students see their work in action and learn from how real users interact with the software over time. During this process, students often uncover critical needs the client hadn't even articulated yet - a level of insight no classroom assignment can provide.

Every project is supervised by a dual team: an industry practitioner and a faculty member. They balance two essential responsibilities: ensuring the client's business succeeds and guiding the student's growth as a professional builder.

While these goals might seem to compete, they are actually complementary, much like a teaching hospital. A senior doctor's priority is to train a resident, but they do so by ensuring patient safety at every step. Similarly, our mentors guide students to deliver high-quality work while developing their expertise.

This model also creates a significant advantage for our faculty. Real-world business problems are rarely tidy, and they serve as rich, complex research material. These engagements provide professors with live, practical challenges, bridging the critical gap between academic theory and real-world application.

Far Deeper Than Any Internship

Forge isn't intended to replace traditional internships. Internships are valuable for seeing how a specific company operates and tackling defined tasks within a team. We still encourage students to seek those experiences, especially at early-stage startups, where they can learn a great deal.

However, internships are often limited by singularity. Students might solve one problem at one company, but that deep - yet narrow - knowledge may not translate well to their next role.

Forge offers a different kind of advantage: breadth and complete ownership.

• Own the entire problem: Instead of working on a small slice of a task, students manage projects from the first conversation to final delivery. They face real stakes because a real business is waiting on the result.
• Broad perspective: By working across many organizations, students learn the universal patterns of how technology is built and integrated into a business, rather than just learning the habits of a single firm.
• Continuous mentorship: Unlike a seasonal internship, mentorship at Forge is ongoing, supporting students term after term.

The Forge experience is designed to evolve throughout your academic career. You start by building under close supervision. As a student earns trust - proving her code is reliable and her solutions are adopted - she takes on more complex engagements. Eventually, a select few will even help lead Forge itself, sourcing clients and learning firsthand what it takes to run a business. Every step in this progression is earned through proven, high-quality work.

SMEs Gain the Builders They Have Lost

Singapore has established a strong national AI strategy through initiatives like AI Singapore and partnerships with global labs. AI Singapore has built real capability across the workforce, and OpenAI opened its first Applied AI Lab outside the United States here in May 2026. The divide is in implementation. Large corporations have the internal engineering teams to turn these tools into working systems: in 2024, 62.5 percent of them had put AI to work, against 14.5 percent of SMEs.

This gap is the result of a structural shift: a generation ago, firms kept technical staff on-site, but the move to cloud-based subscription software (SaaS) led most SMEs to phase out these roles to save costs. Now that AI requires custom integration rather than plug-and-play purchasing, these businesses have the appetite to innovate but no one to do the building. While current government programs provide excellent funding, tools, and advisory services, they often stop short of actual execution.

National program	Who it reaches	Form of support
For SMEs
SMEs Go Digital · GenAI Navigator	SMEs	Grants (up to 50%) + pre-approved tools
CTO-as-a-Service · GenAI Sandbox	SMEs	Advisory + trial environments
AI Singapore · AI for Industry, courses	SMEs / workforce	Training + enablement
Productivity Solutions Grant	SMEs	Subsidy for pre-scoped solutions
For large firms
Enterprise Compute Initiative (S$150m) · GenAI Playbook	Large / mature firms	Compute + bespoke partnerships
Champions of AI	Selected leading firms	Capability support

Forge serves as the missing piece in this ecosystem, providing the skilled builders who convert technological capability into functional, daily results for SMEs. By establishing this track record, we create a scalable model that can eventually expand into regulated sectors like healthcare and defense, where the teaching-hospital framework of supervised governance provides the security these industries need to innovate safely.

The shortage there has a different cause. The SME gap is one of scale: the talent exists, and a firm too small to keep a builder on staff can neither afford one nor attract one. Healthcare and defense are often large and well funded, and keep builders out anyway, through clearance, through regulation, and through an institutional caution that is warranted. Both are for later, and both need adapting first.

Why Now: Forward-Deployed Engineering

The coming years don't just need more engineers; they need a different kind of builder. The most valuable talent today is someone who can sit down with a business, grasp the problem the client hasn't fully articulated, build the precise solution, and stay involved until it is actually working on the ground.

In the industry, this is known as a forward-deployed engineer - a role currently in extremely high demand because these builders work inside the customer's world rather than at arm's length.

Forge trains students to do exactly this. By mastering the ability to understand an organization, create the right technical fit, and see a project through to full adoption, our students gain a massive advantage. Regardless of their specialization, every Forge graduate leaves with a skillset that is both rare and highly sought after, setting them apart from every other computing graduate in the job market.

Closing an Industry-Wide Gap in Applied Research

Every project at Forge begins with a practical puzzle: What does this specific business need, and how can we make it work in their real-world environment? Students solve these problems by building. By working with dozens of firms, they uncover universal patterns - what truly works and what doesn't. This field knowledge is incredibly valuable, and once stripped of sensitive client details, it offers a public, practical record of how technology behaves in the wild.

This is the essence of applied research, similar to the work done by frontier labs like OpenAI's Applied AI Lab. The critical difference is economic. Frontier labs naturally focus on large enterprises because that is where the contracts are, leaving the vast majority of the economy - Small-to-Medium Enterprises (SMEs) - underserved. Because Forge is student-powered, we can bridge this gap. We are the applied lab that can finally serve the businesses that tech giants ignore.

We are not trying to replace the university's traditional research centers, which excel at grant-funded, publication-first, theoretical work. Forge is different. We focus on the messy reality of deployment: how things break, how systems integrate, and how users actually interact with new tools.

In fact, Forge sits upstream from our other research centers, feeding them exactly what they need:

• Live problems: Real-world challenges that are too specific for typical grant funding.
• Unique data: Practical, deployment-level data that is otherwise impossible to find.
• Strategic relationships: Standing partnerships with organizations that a traditional center could not reach on its own.

Finally, because Forge is part of a university, not a private corporation, we act as neutral ground. We can bring together tools from every frontier lab and put them to work in markets that were previously unreachable. In this ecosystem, everyone wins: the labs see their tools deployed in new markets, the businesses finally get the technical solutions they need, and our students tackle problems that no one else is solving.

It Pays Its Own Way, Eventually

Forge is built to be self-sustaining. We charge a standard market rate - roughly $3,000 to $5,000 per month - for each project. Because we don't just hand over the software, but continue to run and maintain it, every project generates recurring revenue. In time, this income will fully cover student stipends and the center's operational costs.

To launch the center and cover early operational costs, initial seed funding from the School of Computing is required to establish the first pipeline of projects. We are open to sponsorship, but we avoid exclusive, single-sponsor arrangements. By diversifying our support, we maintain the independence to choose the projects and partners that best serve our mission, rather than being beholden to any single organization's agenda.

We also prioritize professional governance. The center acts as the contracting party, meaning the University carries the liability and manages professional insurance, just as it does for other external work. Students are paid, their hours are strictly capped, and they operate within a structured, professional framework.

After surveying over forty leading university programs worldwide, we found that while every individual component of Forge exists elsewhere, no one has combined them into a single, cohesive model. We are creating a unique entity where students build, maintain, and eventually help lead an organization that functions as both a teaching hospital and a self-funding business. It is a new approach, but it is one grounded in proven, real-world experience.

In Time, More for the Whole School to Work With

Beyond the financial benefits, Forge strengthens our school's entire academic ecosystem. It connects our faculty with companies tackling live, complex problems, fostering long-term partnerships that extend far beyond a single project. This flow of practical, deployment-level data - the kind that large frontier labs typically keep to themselves - opens new avenues for research and connects our researchers with real-world problems that SMEs are desperate to solve.

For our junior faculty, Forge provides something essential that is often hard to find: immediate access to live challenges, a team of talented students ready to build, and projects with clear, real-world adoption.

We must be clear about the investment required: the primary cost is faculty supervision. In the early stages, this requires time from our most in-demand faculty members - time that may not immediately yield a traditional paper or grant. It is an investment in human capital, building a more capable student body before the financial or academic returns are fully realized.

In the long term, if Forge succeeds and earns more than it costs, it will serve as a resource for the entire school, potentially funding other innovation and entrepreneurship initiatives.

Where the C-Innovators Sharpen Their Edge

Forge is open to all SoC students, but it serves as a training ground for C-Innovators. While the C-Innovators Programme builds founders, Forge provides the practical experience to get there. It moves students beyond classroom exercises into real-world engagements where they must manage client relationships, navigate business operations, and drive actual adoption. This serves as a practical response to the entrepreneurship readiness gap identified in recent student surveys.

Here, students source their own SME partners and learn the fundamentals of running a business while still in school. Some will even grow into leadership roles within the center itself.

We operate as a meritocracy. While C-Innovators get early access to projects, advancement is earned, not given. Any student who consistently delivers high-quality work can rise just as quickly as a C-Innovator. This environment ensures high standards and provides a tangible, real-world benchmark for the C-Innovator program effectiveness, measured by results rather than academic metrics.

A Sustained Channel of Alumni Involvement

Faculty supervision is our most valuable and limited resource. It is in high demand, and we cannot simply manufacture more hours. However, we have a built-in solution: our alumni. Graduates who came up through Forge can return to mentor and supervise client engagements. They have already cleared the high bar for entry and know exactly what the work demands. They understand the difference between a junior-level attempt and a production-ready solution because they have done it themselves.

This reinforces the teaching hospital model: the junior who was trained here becomes the senior who trains the next cohort. This is our primary way to scale capacity. As the pool of alumni supervisors grows, the strain on faculty time decreases. This creates a sustainable, self-improving system where the center is run by the current student body, but supported by the wisdom of those who came before.

Helping Fresh Graduates Reduce Job-Hunting Anxiety

In the last two years, fresh graduates have faced increased anxiety when entering the job market. One reason could be that they are aiming at a narrow list of employers - namely, big tech firms - in an uncertain economic climate. Forge changes the dynamic by giving students real-world experience and range.

Students who graduate from Forge have already worked inside many different businesses. They understand what a logistics firm, a clinic, or a manufacturer actually needs to succeed. This broad perspective makes them valuable to industries they might never have considered. Many traditional companies are eager to hire computing graduates but do not know how to integrate them. A Forge graduate can show up on day one knowing exactly how to contribute because they have already done it.

For those still looking for their perfect role, Forge remains an option. Graduates can continue to work on projects alongside current students, keeping their skills sharp and their resumes active while they search. They maintain their position based on the quality of their work, just as they would in any professional job. This alleviates the pressure of a tight labor market and ensures our graduates are always building toward their next step.

Closing

The primary objective of Forge is to provide a dedicated environment for entrepreneurship development, directly addressing the readiness gap identified in recent student surveys. By shifting the focus from theoretical learning to the creation of real-world software, Forge equips students with the essential lifecycle skills - from identifying client needs to navigating business operations - that are required for successful entrepreneurship.

This model provides a foundational training ground for all students, where the experience of building and deploying functional software serves as the ultimate professional preparation. While C-Innovators sharpen their focus through high-stakes client work, the program's value extends to the entire student body, offering a path to gain professional confidence and navigate a challenging labor market. Furthermore, as the program matures, a sustained channel of alumni engagement will provide ongoing mentorship, creating a self-sustaining cycle of expertise.

The proposal is to establish Forge immediately as a standing center within the School of Computing. By launching as a permanent institution, the school can provide students with consistent access to the real-world challenges of the SME economy, fostering a resilient, self-sustaining ecosystem that benefits students, faculty, and industry partners alike.

What Other Schools Do - the Landscape

A survey of more than forty leading universities across the United States, Europe, Asia, and the Nordics indicates that while elements of Forge exist elsewhere, no single cohesive model combines them. Existing programs typically feature certain limitations:

• Scoped too narrowly: Many real-client clinics exist, but they are limited to data-for-good projects, non-profits, or government agencies. They do not work with the wider SME economy where the need for software builders is greatest.
• Built as a course, not an institution: Programs in places like Finland, Norway, and Estonia successfully run real-client software projects, but they are one-semester courses. They lack a sustained bar for entry, offer no maintenance phase, and are not designed to be self-funding standing centers.
• Optimized for venture, not service: Many schools excel at running accelerators, venture-creation engines, and IP-heavy spinout programs (common in the UK, Greater China, Korea, and Israel). These are superb at creating startups, but they do not teach the service-delivery model that Forge provides.

The local SME consulting models are similarly limited. They teach students to advise - to hand over reports and recommendations - but not to build. Forge is the only model where students own the full cycle: identifying the problem, shipping the code, and maintaining the solution.

When we look at the global landscape, four positions are conspicuously empty - and they are exactly the ones Forge fills:

• Open access with a high bar: Programs are usually either open-and-easy or selective-at-entry. Forge stays open to everyone while maintaining a hard bar throughout, based on continuous, public proof of skill.
• Entry by a building test: No other university gates entry on a combination of a deployed build and a merged open-source contribution.
• The standing teaching hospital: While clinics exist as one-off courses, no one runs one as a standing hospital: with a maintain phase, self-funding economics, AI-native resourcing, and a continuous career path for students.
• Resourcing judgment, not just capital: Most programs resource building with credits, GPUs, or seed funds. Forge resources the judgment, experience, and verifiable proof that students actually need to lead.

The University of Tartu in Estonia is the closest national analogue. They have successfully run a software clinic for over a decade, proving that SMEs will bring real problems to a university and that students can deliver on them. But they built a course, not an institution. They proved the work can be done; Forge proves it can be built into a durable, self-funding, high-standing institution. We are taking the clinic model and building the missing infrastructure around it - the earned access, the public record, and the economics that allow it to scale.

Program	Where	What it does	Where it stops short of Forge
Real-client clinics
Data Science for Social Good	UChicago → CMU	Small teams + full-time mentors build for real government / non-profit partners	Scoped to data-for-good, not general SME software
Data Science Discovery	UC Berkeley	Credit-bearing, always-on clinic at scale (~250 projects and 900+ students a year)	Same data-only scope; not a general build clinic
Hack4Impact · Cal Blueprint	Penn · Berkeley	Students ship real, deployed software for non-profits ("deploy, not demo")	Non-profit-scoped; student-org, not a center with supervision + progression
"Software Project"	UT Tartu (Estonia)	Decade-plus general real-client software course; teams ship production software for real businesses, SMEs included (a bank's first mobile app, a startup's own product now in real use)	A one-semester faculty course, open enrollment (no building-test entry), judged on delivery rather than adoption, no maintain phase, unpaid - not a standing center
"Software Project"	Aalto · Helsinki (Finland)	Real-client software built for real firms over a semester; client pays ~EUR 3,000	Same one-semester-course limits; clients skew mid / large; no building-test, no adoption bar, no stipend, not AI-native
Customer-Driven Project (TDT4290)	NTNU (Norway)	Students build software for real external customers, for credit	One semester, no bar, judged on delivery rather than adoption - not a center
Problem-based learning · project semesters	Aalborg (Denmark)	Students take on real problems from real companies as coursework across the university (Aalborg's PBL), with project-based, company-collaborating software semesters (SDU, KEA)	Problem-based coursework rather than a dedicated software clinic; admission-gated and graded, unpaid, no building-test entry, judged on delivery rather than adoption - not a standing center
Consulting on real SME projects (the closest local model)
Asian Enterprise Institute · SME Consulting Programme	UOB-SMU	Undergraduate teams take on real SME projects under external industry mentors (subsidized)	Students advise, and under its SCP+ track help implement some recommendations; they do not build or deploy software; project-based, and they do not run the center
Entry test & verifiable record
Google Summer of Code · Outreachy	Open-source	Stipended real contributions to live open-source projects; selection is doing the work	Not a university; no SME client work
Creative Destruction Lab	U of Toronto	Keeps a high bar throughout - culls between every session	Selective at entry; venture-focused, not open
Apprenticeship & work-integrated
Mayfield Fellows	Stanford	Paid, embedded startup apprenticeship (12 students/year)	Tiny and selective; sends students into others' startups
Overseas Colleges (NOC)	NUS	Paid startup internships abroad, for credit - Singapore's flagship learn-by-working model	Sends students out to others' startups; Forge keeps them in, owning real client work
Furnace	NUS SoC	In-school incubator (deferred-fee) - the in-school precedent	An incubator for ventures, not a teaching hospital doing supervised client work