Acting Minister for Education (Schools) Mr Ng Chee Meng highlighted yesterday at the Singapore Economic Policy Forum that people must be "future-ready" if Singapore is to overcome its demographic challenges and technological disruption. At the forum jointly organised by the Economic Society of Singapore and SMU School of Economics, economists discussed the new challenges faced by the Singapore economy, such as how to deliver innovation and manage rising wage expectations. SMU Professor of Economics Hoon Hian Teck warned that just having a constant flow of new ideas move through the economy every year would not be enough to deliver the growing wages that many aspire to. Rather, Singapore must grow its "innovation intensity", and "deliver new ideas at a compound rate in order to generate the kind of productivity growth to support wage aspirations". This can be supported by changes in the education system, but there is still a limit to how much indigenous "innovation intensity" can grow, and when the citizen workforce begins to shrink from 2020 onwards, the supply of innovators here may need a boost.