Can you hear that? No? Shhh… listen…. Nothing? Nothing at all? It’s the sound that a vacation makes.

No students, no lecturers and the best of all, two of my bosses are on leave. Yes, this is the State of Beautiful Bliss, population 1, capital city, TNL.

But admittedly, quiet bliss only goes so far. With students and lecturers away, I am getting not too many stories to tell you. And you know how much joy I derive in telling you stories.

Too little, too soon. Somebody up there heard me and I now have like 3 enquiries lined up one after another. One from a PHD Engineering student, one from a MBA and one from a lecturer. Don’t these people take vacations?

The PHD Engineering student was doing her thesis on the value of service innovations. She had been to see me before the vacation and we had discussed how to obtain R&D expenditure in Singapore. We identified some government bodies and research centers. She wants to meet up again to discuss firm-level R&D statistics. It is going to be rough ride but from the R&D expenditure she dug out so far, she’ll be ok.

The MBA student has a rougher ride. She wanted e-solutions industry information in Free Trade Zones worldwide. I wouldn’t even go into the details of this one. She had to work on primary sources and googling. But it is not just googly-googling, she had to forget about keywords such as Free Trade Zones or e-solutions. Go straight to a combine search of the product name and the zone name or city name. Check out the results for competitor products and run more searches using the various product names.

As for the lecturer (who only vacations where there is email access) – he wanted FDI statistics of one cyclone struck Asian country. He found a research paper that shows that our Little Red Dot is one of its major investors. But then the statistics was from 2002.

So, I guess there goes bliss. But hey, you get stories and I get joy, right?