Strategies of innovation

Protection of intellectual property rights could help China grow its own technologies and domestic brands

Whether or not China can realize its ambitious strategy of developing itself into an innovative and creative nation will be decided to a large extent by whether it can boost the competitiveness of its homegrown technologies, its cultural power and the influence of domestic brands.

To facilitate this process, the country needs to take more concrete and effective measures to strengthen protection of its intellectual property rights (IPR) and innovation.

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The country should look at the remarkable achievements of its manufacturing sector in a cool-headed manner. In 2010, China ranked as No 1 in the world in terms of the manufacturing volumes of a variety of products, but that does not mean that the country is a global manufacturing power.

Despite its ever-expanding manufacturing scale in recent years, the productivity of China's manufacturing sector is still at a generally low level.

China's manufacturing generally lies at the middle- and low-end of the global manufacturing chain. Statistics show that the value added by China's labor is only $1,790 per person a year while it is 6.5 times higher in Japan and 10.2 times higher in the United States.

To extricate itself from this position, China should make unremitting efforts to accelerate its much-needed industrial restructuring, develop some new industries and try to improve and enforce a stricter patent system. That means the country should not only focus on expanding the quantity and scale of its patents, but it should also try to improve their quality and utilization efficacy, particularly core patent technologies.

To this end, more effective measures need to be taken to raise the proportion of the country's scientific research input to its gross domestic product (GDP), which was only 1.7 percent in 2010, slightly higher than the world's average of 1.6 percent.

In some other innovation-focused nations, research input, accounts for 2 percent of their GDP. In the Republic of Korea (ROK) this proportion is as high as 3.1 percent.

While trying to increase its ratio of research input to GDP, China must also strive to convert more of its scientific and technological research into practical applications. Currently, only about 25 percent of technological research has been used for industrial or market purposes in China, much lower than the 60 to 80 percent average in some developed countries.