‘Capacity-building’ programs focused on economics, business and legal training have had more than one and a half decades of history inthe DPRK. Often, the impact of such programs is hard to observe. Onereason for this is that programs often conflate ideation with capacity building objectives. Ideation focuses on the exposure to different ideas on organizing economic activity, in order to encourage participants to see possibilities for their future and motivate them to prioritize economic development as an urgent objective. Capacity-building aims to support government policies by transferring necessary skillsets and knowledge,and its effectiveness is often predicated on pre-existing political will for changes to policy to support economic development. Training programs can be improved through conscious deliberation of these two objectives,and by calibrating the emphasis on the objectives through program design. We examine the role ideation played in the Chinese reform process, when Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping visited Singapore, and extrapolate the role Singapore can play for similar programs for North Koreans.