I'll be honest, when I found out our International MBA immersion week was in Singapore, my first thought wasn't about business strategy or economic policy, it was about the food. Seventeen hours later, I was eating the best chicken rice of my life at a hawker centre that costs less than a coffee back in Barcelona. That part lived up to every expectation.
But Singapore has a way of sneaking up on you. What started as a week of lectures, company visits and discussions at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) turned into something I'm still processing weeks later, not because of what Singapore has built, but because of why and how it was built.
I came home thinking less about the skyline or the spotless streets and more about a question I couldn't quite shake: how does a place with literally no natural resources - no oil, limited land and water, no industrial base - become one of the world's most economically competitive nations in little more than a generation? That's not a gradual climb. That's a transformation and understanding that transformation became the thread running through the entire week.
What hit me most when we explored this during our sessions at NTU wasn't the outcome, it was the consistency. Singapore didn't get lucky. It made the same deliberate choices, over and over, long after it would have been politically convenient to stop. There's a reason the line that stayed with me wasn't about GDP or rankings. It was simpler than that: the difference was never resources. It was the mindset of those who led.
That perspective changed how I saw everything else during the week. Visiting Seagate's manufacturing facilities, one of the largest data storage operations in the world, felt less like a company tour and more like seeing concepts from strategy, operations and innovation come to life. It was a reminder that global competitiveness isn't built overnight, it comes from decades of investment in people, infrastructure and long-term thinking. And at ERI@N - Energy Research Institute @ NTU we saw a university actively trying to solve the next set of problems before they fully arrive, treating sustainability not as a value to signal but as an engineering challenge to crack.
That distinction matters to me, especially now that I'm heading into a sustainability specialisation at EADA. The version of sustainability that actually changes things isn't the one living in a separate department or a corporate responsibility report. It's the version embedded in decisions about infrastructure, investment and innovation. Seeing that approach in Singapore gave me a clearer picture of what sustainable leadership can look like in practice, and how business can be a driver of meaningful, long-term change.
We also spent time with entrepreneurs, Prantik Mazumdar, Mahesh Kumar, and Chandrima Das, who shared what it actually feels like to build something in Singapore's ecosystem. Their stories reminded us that even the strongest ecosystem doesn't guarantee success. It creates the conditions, but you still have to show up, take real risks and make the hard calls yourself. These conversations offered a more honest perspective on entrepreneurship than any success story alone could.
I came into this International MBA looking for better ways to think. Singapore gave me a week of proof that the right mindset, sustained long enough, turns scarcity into opportunity. That's not something you learn from a textbook. A week isn't long enough to fully understand a place like Singapore, but it was long enough to leave me asking better questions.
Experiences like this are what make EADA's International MBA more than a classroom experience. They connect theory with practice, expose you to different ways of thinking, and challenge assumptions in ways that stay with you long after the trip ends. I'm grateful to EADA and the NTU community for making it happen, and to Singapore, for being exactly the kind of place that makes you want to think bigger. I'm leaving with a renewed appreciation that some of the most valuable lessons in business don't come from case studies, they come from seeing how different societies choose to solve problems, and asking what we can learn from them.
Author
Richa Martin
Participant International MBA 2025-2026