Almost every business owner we meet is sitting on one. The idea that comes up at every strategy lunch and dies by dessert. “We should really look into online booking.” “Maybe our customers would use an app.” “What if AI handled our enquiries?” And then the conversation ends the same way it always does: “But we don’t know if it’d work — and we can’t justify the budget just to find out.”
Here’s the thing most owners don’t know: Singapore has a grant for exactly that moment. Not for building the thing — for finding out whether you should. It’s the DesignSingapore Council’s Good Design Research (GDR) programme, currently being upgraded into a bigger successor called GDRD. And if you recognise yourself in any of the scenarios below, it might be the cheapest answer you’ll ever buy.
“I want to know if my customers would actually use this”
This is the grant’s home ground. Say you run a clinic, a gym, a restaurant group, a B2B service — and you suspect your customers want a better way to book, order, or interact with you. Suspecting isn’t knowing, and building the wrong thing is expensive.
What the grant funds: proper research with your actual customers, a working prototype of the idea, and real testing — ending in a clear, evidence-backed answer: build it, change it, or drop it. You get the answer before the big spend, with the government co-funding the finding-out.
“I have a new service or product idea, but it’s a gamble”
Maybe it’s a new digital service alongside your existing business. A subscription model. A self-serve version of something you currently do manually. The idea feels promising, but “promising” has burned you before.
This grant exists to de-risk exactly this. It pays for the exploration phase — understanding what customers really need, designing the concept around those needs, and validating it as a proof of concept — so that when you do commit real money, you’re committing to something tested, not something hoped.
“I want to try AI, but I’m not sure where it fits us”
A very 2026 version of the same problem. You keep reading that AI could transform customer service, sales follow-up, operations — but will it work for your customers, in your business? Nobody can tell you from a brochure.
Here’s the useful subtlety: “build me an AI chatbot” is not what this grant funds — but “find out whether an AI chatbot would work for my customers” is. The research, the working AI prototype, the testing with real users — that’s a design-research project with a proof of concept at the end, and it fits. (And if the answer comes back yes, other schemes like PSG and the EIS tax deduction help fund the full build. First grant answers should we, the next ones fund let’s go.)
“Our customer experience feels dated, but a redesign feels like guesswork”
Perhaps the way customers move through your business — from first enquiry to purchase to follow-up — was designed years ago, and you can feel it creaking. You could redesign on instinct. Or you could research how your customers actually behave, prototype a rethought experience, and test it before rebuilding anything. The second path is what this grant supports.
What doesn’t fit — the honest line
This matters, because pitching the wrong project wastes everyone’s time. The grant funds research and testing, not routine building. So:
- “Refresh our website” — doesn’t fit. That’s implementation, not research.
- “Build us an app” — doesn’t fit, for the same reason.
- “Find out whether our customers would use an app, and prove it with a prototype” — fits.
The simplest test: if your sentence contains “we don’t know whether…”, you’re probably in grant territory. If it starts with “just build us…”, you’re not — other grants cover that instead.
The basic eligibility is simple too: a company registered and operating in Singapore, at least two years old.
What’s on the table
Under the current GDR, support runs up to S$50,000 in co-funding for qualifying project costs, plus mentorship and profiling from DesignSingapore Council. The bigger news: the programme is being replaced by GDRD (Good Design Research and Development), and early reporting suggests substantially larger support — press coverage has cited co-funding of up to S$450,000 for design-led development work, backed by over S$15 million across the first three years.
Two honest cautions. The GDRD figures come from press reporting; the official terms haven’t been published yet, so confirm everything with DesignSingapore Council before planning around a number. And the funding is milestone-based — the major reimbursement arrives after the proof of concept is completed and approved, so you pay along the way and claim back. This is general information, not grant advice; final eligibility is always Dsg’s call.
What one of these projects actually looks like
So you can picture it end to end: you bring the idea. A design-research partner (that’s where we come in) spends a few weeks understanding your customers — interviews, observation, data. Then they design and build a rough working prototype of the idea: clickable, testable, real enough to react to. Your actual customers try it. What comes back is evidence — what they used, what they ignored, what they’d pay for — written up as the validated proof of concept the grant requires.
You end with one of two outcomes, and both are wins: a green light backed by proof (and a far cheaper, better-aimed build, because you now know exactly what to build) — or a clear no, discovered at a fraction of the cost of building the wrong thing.
Where Oasis Web Asia comes in
This kind of project is precisely how we like to work — it’s the “understand your business first, then build” philosophy with government co-funding attached. We run the research, build the prototype (websites, apps, AI — whatever the idea calls for), test it with your customers, and produce the documentation the grant expects, in the right sequence to protect your claim: scope and quote first, apply before committing, then explore. If the idea proves out, we’re naturally the team that builds the real thing — with the research already done.
If you’ve got one of those ideas that keeps surviving every strategy meeting but never gets a budget, that’s exactly the conversation we like to have.
Start a conversation → — get a free consultation with our Singapore-based team.