I'd suggest that it's because the "happy path" for most residents in Singapore is ridiculously straightforward to navigate, so people don't need to be resourceful to accomplish things.

As a Singaporean, I've travelled to Vietnam multiple times, and have worked with Vietnamese on projects before. The Vietnamese usually get my admiration for being highly resourceful and entrepreneurial. They're really good at hustling and improvising.

Lots of working-class Singaporeans aren't raised like that, because the first 18 to 20 years of their lives have been laid out for them.

>And saying that Vietnam has more creativity isn't exactly a high bar given the similar values of Confucian hierarchy here!

I know some mainland Chinese who live in Singapore, and they often complain about how closed-minded the locals are. If Vietnam is similar to China in that regard, then it might well be less hierarchical than Singapore (Chinese culture seems much less hierarchical than some other Confucian-influenced cultures like Japan/Korea, maybe due to the communist revolution actively demonising Confucious, and Vietnam also had a similar revolution).

And it has majority of its population living in small towns, and villages, some of which don't even have a single cellphone tower.