Hong Kong on highway to become global tech and innovation hub

The Hong Kong Science Park, the city’s substantial-tech hub, welcomed Chinese President Xi Jinping for a check out all through his active two-day trip to attend celebrations for the 25th anniversary of Hong Kong’s return to China.

The Science Park is the major research and enhancement (R&D) and small business incubation foundation in Hong Kong, housing a lot more than 1,100 enterprises and 17,000 innovators.

Among them are SenseTime, an artificial intelligence (AI) large, which is the only organization from the Science Park mentioned on the Hong Kong Stock Trade, and Da-Jiang Improvements (DJI), a environment-leading business drone maker.

The Science Park, launched in 2002 by the governing administration of the Hong Kong Distinctive Administrative Location (HKSAR) to market scientific and technological enhancement in the metropolis, also accommodates prime-amount laboratories with highly developed scientific exploration gear.

So much, it has 28 R&D laboratories jointly operated by environment-class universities and research institutions with locally centered universities in Hong Kong.

With a total flooring space of 400,000 sq. meters and 23 properly-geared up properties as of March 2021, the park is continue to being expanded to enhance its R&D area. 

Large anticipations for Hong Kong

In the course of his inspection tour of the Science Park, Xi stated the place holds higher expectations for Hong Kong.

He claimed China has created its assistance for developing Hong Kong into an intercontinental innovation and technologies hub in its 14th 5-Yr Plan (2021-2025). Produced final 12 months, the program serves as the blueprint and motion agenda for the social and financial growth of the nation in the following five several years.

In the latest years, with the guidance of the central authorities, Hong Kong has leveraged its very own benefits to make extraordinary achievements in basic exploration, talent cultivation, and development in the innovation and engineering sector, Xi claimed.

In 2021, Hong Kong rated 14th on the world wide list of most progressive economies, in accordance to the World-wide Innovation Index (GII) produced by the Planet Intellectual Property Corporation (WIPO).

The HKSAR authorities should give entire participate in to the function of technological innovation in supporting and leading economic improvement, Xi extra.

For the duration of his exchanges with the academicians, researchers and youth reps of innovation enterprises at the Science Park, he called on Hong Kong to superior cooperate with mainland cities in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Bigger Bay Space (GBA), reinforce the collaborative advancement of enterprises, universities and investigate establishments, and attempt to establish the GBA into a global highland for scientific and technological innovation. 

GBA’s increasing innovation ability

The GBA is comprised of the two distinctive administrative locations of Hong Kong and Macao, and nine towns in the neighboring Guangdong Province. The total region is all over 56,000 sq. kilometers and covers all-around 6 p.c of the Chinese populace.

The gross domestic merchandise (GDP) of the GBA strike 12.6 trillion yuan ($1.97 trillion) previous yr, 2.4 trillion yuan extra than in 2017. With considerably less than 1 percent of the country’s land spot, the GBA contributed to 11 % of the countrywide GDP.

Shao Xinyu, Chinese vice minister of science and technology, claimed the innovation abilities of the GBA have been increasing continually.

In 2021, the R&D expenditure of the 9 towns in the Pearl River Delta location in just the GBA topped 360 billion yuan, accounting for about 3.7 per cent of their GDP, according to Shao, in contrast with the over-all countrywide level of 2.44 %.

The number of high-tech enterprises in the space attained 57,000, and that of patents granted arrived at about 780,000, of which extra than 100,000 were being creation patents, he claimed.

In the list of the world’s major 100 geographical innovation clusters posted by WIPO each year, the Shenzhen-Hong Kong-Guangzhou cluster ranked next for the previous two a long time in a row.

The mounting innovation cluster, with recognizable development in patents and scientific publications, has narrowed its gap with Tokyo-Yokohama, the No.1 innovation cluster on the listing. 

Supporting measures for Hong Kong and Macao’s sci-tech enhancement

China’s Ministry of Science and Know-how (MOST) has rolled out a series of steps to help the scientific and technological improvement of Hong Kong and Macao to boost their additional integration into the countrywide innovation procedure, in accordance to Dai Gang, director of the International Cooperation Section at the MOST.

The ministry has supported Hong Kong in constructing a batch of innovation platforms, which include 16 Condition Vital Laboratories, 6 branches of the Chinese Countrywide Engineering Analysis Facilities in Hong Kong, three nationwide substantial-tech industrialization associate bases and two countrywide-amount incubators for science and know-how corporations.

A comparable coverage has been taken with Macao.

The ministry also put ahead actions to assist younger people from Hong Kong and Macao to go after careers in ground breaking industries and start their have organizations on the mainland.