Forum discusses innovation's role in development

A main forum of the World Internet Conference-Internet Development Forum themed "Science, Technology and Innovation for Development" was held in Wuzhen, East China's Zhejiang province on Monday to present views from officials and experts.

China will build an all-directional and multi-tiered ecological environment in innovation by promoting institutional innovation, technological innovation, management innovation and mode innovation, as well as strengthening protection of intellectual property rights and stimulating entrepreneurship, which places innovation in a key role for high-quality development, said Zhao Zeliang, vice-minister of the Cyberspace Administration of China.

Moreover, the country will speed up integration between the internet, big data and artificial intelligence with the real economy, and strengthen open exchanges and sharing of global innovation resources, Zhao said.

Zhejiang will maintain an open attitude to the outside world and actively create an innovative ecological environment, said Zhu Guoxian, head of Zhejiang's publicity department.

By the end of this year, more than 80 percent of government services will be accepted online in the province, Zhu said. The local government will help traditional industries accelerate the transformation from "manufacturing" to "intelligent manufacturing", promote new business forms and models such as cross-border e-commerce, mobile payment and the sharing economy, and boost industrial chain, supply chain and value chain integration in deepen, Zhu added.

The Chinese Academy of Sciences will continue to plan and launch major international science programs and projects to dive bilateral and multilateral academic exchanges for jointly building a scientific and technological innovation community and give contribution to global development, said Guo Huadong, an academician at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Particular attention is being paid to food supply security, bio-security and cyber security in Turkey, said Hasan Mandal, chairman of the country's Scientific and Technological Research Council. Digitization not only offers great potential for person-to-person, machine-to-machine and human-to-machine connections, but also brings challenges. For example, the number of cyber attacks is rising as internet traffic increases during the COVID-19 pandemic, he said. In the future, there will be more bilateral and multilateral cooperation, especially in scientific and technological research and development. Mandal said such cooperation should not be limited to mutual cooperation, but should also include co-creation.