"Let's Slow Dance Out of the Box" The centipede was happy, quite, Until a toad in fun Said, "Pray, which leg goes after which?" This worked his mind to such a pitch, He lay distracted in a ditch, Considering how to run.  -Alan Watts, The Way of Zen (1990)

The "garage" that Cozzee.com is currently operating out of is my partner Fraser's one-bedroom apartment. We can't complain: It has a decent-size living area that serves as our work space. It also does multiple duty as our meeting room, photo studio (for Cozzee ad shoots), bar, and TV den. When we need a break, we gaze out the eighth-floor window at the condominium's glittering, blue swimming pool, hoping for some inspiration.

That's our immediate environment. The bigger environment is Singapore, the island in pursuit of big dot-com dreams, where "creative destruction," "risk-taking," and "technopreneurs" have become the current buzzwords. The entrepreneurial spirit is a funny creature.

Left to itself in Silicon Valley, risk-taking bubbles up in a groundswell of ingenuity and nerve, generating great ideas and companies. But in Singapore, years of extensive government economic planning and a conservative social environment have blunted the risk-taking spirit somewhat.

Having observed the U.S. dot-com phenomenon, Singapore has decided it needs to cultivate the entrepreneurial spirit to compete aggressively in the New Economy. How to kick-start this long-neglected quality? In a land where laws reach into bathrooms and bedrooms without people even blinking, Singapore's answer, of course, is government intervention.

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LOWER HURDLES. Recognizing the embryonic stage of the venture-capital industry here, the government has parked $1 billion with venture-capital funds to help high-tech and knowledge-based startups. The state is selecting investors that will match the public funds with their own capital and can provide business expertise.

While some small-business owners might shudder at the thought of any state involvement, these moves have not been a bad thing for us. For example, Cozzee has approached some of these VCs, with an eye to obtaining more value-added support than just financing.

Cozzee has also benefited from the government's attempts to import talented entrepreneurs as some immigration hurdles were lowered. On a smaller scale, the National Science & Technology Board organizes a bimonthly networking event, with high-tech startups, angel investors, venture capitalists, service providers, and other interested parties attending. Fraser was one of the 500 or so who attended the last one in June, where he made a few extremely useful contacts.

Altering regulations is easy. The harder challenge is to change the predominant risk-averse mindset here. This has caused Fraser and me some frustration in the course of building our company. For example, we are looking for a technology officer and have placed ads in a few online employment agencies. We have had some interesting responses from candidates in India, Philippines, and the U.S. However, there were none from Singapore. The one Singapore candidate we were interested in and met with told us he was not keen on joining a startup as it was not stable enough (compared with a big, established company).

FAILURE-AVOIDANCE. Even our part-time telemarketer told us that she prefers to work in a "proper" office environment. (Guess she didn't appreciate our pool view and the soft trip-hop music in the background.) We have encountered a few candidates who say they think Cozzee is a winning idea but do not want to sign on as it's still such an infant company. The recent negative stock market sentiment toward Internet startups has also helped to frighten off an already conservative populace.

But emulating the success of Silicon Valley is about more than importing the technology. It's about adopting its attitudes toward risk and change -- and tolerating (even exalting) the idea of failure. The government realizes this, and despite its long tradition of intrusive regulation, is trying to get Singaporeans to start thinking out of the box, to be more creative.

Starting with the fundamentals, Singapore has revamped its education system to focus on critical thinking and IT skills, rather than rote learning.

The powers-that-be also want to tackle Singaporeans' almost phobic aversion to failure, reinforced for decades by the constant threat of swift and severe retribution if citizens misbehave in the political, economic, or social arenas. A small step in the direction of risk: Bankruptcy laws have been relaxed to cushion business failures. Investors in startups can now take tax deductions for their losses.

SURPRISING SALES STAFFER. Outside the economic realm, Singapore's liberalization experiment has resulted in a few strange situations. For example, citizens now have a space to speak their minds at a Speakers' Corner a la London's Hyde Park. (You can speak on anything, except certain political, racial, and religious matters, and, oh, please don't forget to get a police permit before you open your mouth.)

Inevitably, these contradictions infect the economic field as well. I have noticed that in the VC culture here, the focus seems to be an avoidance of failure, as opposed to U.S. investors' focus on finding the winner. As such, local VCs tend to take on fewer and more conservative deals. This means that more money may be available for "safer" investments, such as ideas that are copies of ventures elsewhere. Meanwhile, Silicon Valley et al. win out in financing more innovative projects.

Having said that, the trends I am seeing in Singapore's Internet scene are heartening. People are slowly breaking away from old, conservative work habits, taking on new risks, and starting their own businesses -- perhaps not at the same speed as in the U.S., but it is definitely happening. Cozzee's most surprising employee has been a middle-aged woman who didn't know the first thing about the Internet before joining us. Yet somehow, she instinctively grasps our ideas about Cozzee's potential as an online reverse marketplace that harnesses cutting-edge technology, and she has become a gem of a saleswoman for us.

Singapore is only in the early stages of a fascinating, bold experiment of socioeonomic engineering. Where all these efforts take us remains to be seen. Who knows? The centipede could just get up and do a 100-meter dash.

Sandy Oh is a former investment banker who writes from Singapore, where she and her partner founded the Internet startup, Cozzee.com (www.cozzee.com). The 29-year-old Netrepreneur writes regularly about the challenges she faces building her unusual business in Asia's young, vibrant Internet scene. You can e-mail her at sandy@cozzee.com