By Simon Wilcox

WHEN it comes to starting up their own business, Singaporeans educated no further than secondary-school level are beating their university-educated counterparts hands down.

One in 10 junior college graduates takes the entrepreneurial plunge compared with just one in 25 university or polytechnic graduates.

This is one of the findings of a survey of entrepreneurship in 37 countries - run by United States-based Babson College and the London Business School - and carried out in Singapore by the Centre for Entrepreneurship at the National University of Singapore.

'The lack of entrepreneurial propensity among Singapore university graduates is totally at odds with other countries where it is university graduates who are most likely to start up a new business,' Associate Professor Wong Poh Kam of the Centre for Entrepreneurship said.

'Given that most of the growth in the knowledge economy worldwide is coming from graduates with advanced technical knowledge, we need to focus on how we can increase entrepreneurial interest in this group in Singapore.'

Said Mr Ng Hock Ching, entrepreneur and co-founder of NatSteel Electronics, at the presentation of the survey findings yesterday: 'It's the MNC syndrome. All those university graduates have traditionally gone on to join the big boys like Hewlett-Packard, leaving the junior college guys with something to prove.

'It's this 'something to prove' factor that drives entrepreneurship.'

Overall, about six in 100 people - 5.9 per cent - in Singapore are involved in starting up a business or are owner-managers of firms less than four years old, the 2002 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor found.

This is a slight fall from last year when the proportion was 6.6 per cent. As a result, Singapore was placed 21st in the overall entrepreneurial activity rankings.

This is an improvement on last year, when it was ranked 27th out of 29 nations.

Singapore's environment for entrepreneurship is rated above average on various factors, including government support for start-ups and physical infrastructure.

But social and cultural attitudes such as the fear of failure still deter many Singaporeans from striking out on their own, the survey found.

But this is not holding back NUS graduate Brojo Pillai who, together with a professor and a final-year NUS student, formed a mobile phone software services firm called Purple Ace this year.

It won angel funding after winning a European contest for mobile phone product ideas in March.