Technological achievements finding success

The scientific and technological enterprises incubated and founded by the Chinese Academy of Sciences have helped accelerate the commercialization of scientific achievements and brought significant socioeconomic benefits to the people and the country.

The CAS has committed to exploring new ways to transfer and commercialize scientific results and has encouraged research teams to establish high-tech startup companies in an effort to make enterprises the main driver of technological innovation across the country.

The new 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-25) proposal unveiled in late October again put innovation at the heart of China's future plan, emphasizing scientific and technological self-reliance and stressing that science and technology development should be economy-oriented and meet the needs of the people and the country.

The new blueprint, proposed at the Fifth Plenary Session of the 19th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China that concluded in late October, said the country will need to strengthen the dominant position of enterprises in innovation, promote in-depth integration of production, education and research and support enterprises to take the lead in forming innovation consortia and undertaking major national scientific and technological projects.

It stressed the key role of entrepreneurs in innovation, encouraged enterprises to increase R&D investment and supported small and medium-sized enterprises' efforts to become birthplaces of innovation.

China will also need to strengthen intellectual property protection and greatly improve the commercialization of scientific achievement, according to the blueprint.

In 2016, the CAS launched a special initiative to promote the transfer and commercialization of scientific and technological achievements. In 2018, four subsidiaries were shortlisted among the top 10 academic institutes that reached the highest contract amount in licensing and investment, according to the annual report of China's scientific and technological achievements commercialization in 2019.

The Institute of Microelectronics, for example, has encouraged researchers to join or start their own businesses in a bid to make enterprises the primary driver of technological innovation. By June, the institute has engaged 158 enterprises either by transferring scientific results or making investments. Most companies incubated by the institute have grown rapidly and garnered operation revenue of more than 9 billion yuan ($1.3 billion) in 2019, according to Cao Liqiang, deputy director of the institute.

To meet the major needs in the semiconductor industry, the institute has launched, invested and established projects and companies to boost integrated circuit technologies since 2012. It has set up two key laboratories engaged in cutting-edge basic research and 13 R&D centers for product development and application. For example, the National Center for Advanced Packaging, established in 2012 in Wuxi, Jiangsu province, has become a leading center in offering solutions to advanced semiconductor packaging and testing, according to Cao.

Some enterprises incubated by the institute have also aimed to have a positive socioeconomic impact on the public.

One company called Wayzim, founded in 2016 in Wuxi, has now grown into one of the world's leading companies in producing intelligent logistics equipment with independent R&D and production.

Its founder and chairman, Li Gongyan, also a former researcher at the microelectronics institute, said it was the CAS that granted him the first batch of venture capital that allowed him to conduct four years of basic research on some of the technologies that were key to developing intelligent equipment before establishing the company.

The equipment, which looks like a gigantic, overhead conveyor belt, now excels in its high precision bar code recognition and control system. When a worker puts a parcel on the belt, a bar code reader will automatically register its information into a database, sort the parcel according to its destination and transport it to the designated bag for delivery.

The advanced control system can also make sure each parcel is being placed at the right position and make the "jump" into the bag at the correct pass. The system's speed can reach up to 9 kilometers per hour, and the company has already realized a technology that can allow the equipment to read the bar code from all six sides, greatly relieving manual labor.

China is the world's largest express delivery market, and the parcel volume keeps increasing by more than 30 percent each year, according to Li, adding that it would be quite challenging for manual laborers to sort through hundreds of millions of parcels a day.

Before 2016, China's major delivery companies had struggled with problems related to a glut of parcels in warehouses－especially after Nov 11, the day of China's online shopping spree. But now with better equipment in place, such problems seldom occur.

Wayzim's equipment now covers about 40 to 45 percent of the delivery market across the country and is also exported overseas.

"Express e-commerce is a booming industry in China. We will soon be dealing with 100 million parcels a day," Li said.

"China's e-commerce is leading the world, and the efficiency and cost-control of our express delivery are also leading the world. It is all thanks to the support of technology such as big data, artificial intelligence and cloud computing, as well as our automation equipment," he added.