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Innovation isn't just at the center of human creativity and corporate profit. It's fuel for economic growth and one reason hundreds of millions of people in developing countries have leapt up the income curve over the past two decades. Governments, especially authoritarian ones, understand that without it, growth may slow, jobs may get scarce and instability may rise.

"There are already areas of entrepreneurial ferment across Asia," Tarun Khanna of the Harvard Business School told a group of entrepreneurs, CEOs and industry executives at The Wall Street Journal's conference on Unleashing Innovation in Singapore last week. The key question, Mr. Khanna counseled the delegates from 25 countries, "is how do we take these little sparks and scale them up in some way that's meaningful."

That's the same question corporate chiefs—from General Electric GE -2.54% to Nokia NOK1V.HE -3.76% to Sony 6758.TO -3.73% —are asking every day. How can they generate the spark that ignites the next big thing? Executives at the conference heard some familiar advice: cultivate creativity, a dynamic workplace, irreverence, risk-taking and cross-discipline networking.

But they also got practical. Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, chairman of Biocon, a biotech company, zeroed in on the need for more "regulatory innovation," specifically more use of analytics to measure the safety of drugs. "Do you really need extended clinical trials? Isn't enough information available to know these drugs are safe and efficacious?"

During a week when Singapore announced it was entering the space race and China faced new accusations of cyberespionage in its hunt for the innovations of others, the delegates also heard how innovation can feed the human spirit, not just the other way round.

"Sometimes in China, there is no freedom of speech," Michael Anti, a Chinese microblogger based in Beijing, told the gathering. "But you should act and practice freedom of speech as if it existed. Because if you do that, you can create a free mind."