Innovation and Entrepreneurship Week opens in Zhongguancun

The 2016 National Mass Innovation and Entrepreneurship Week Beijing theme exhibition opened on October 12 at the Zhongguancun Science Park in Beijing.

The show consists of five sections -- building an innovative and entrepreneurial ecology, leading new economics and fostering new drives in automation, creating the Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei province collaborative community, organizing entrepreneurial and innovative activities and publicizing entrepreneurial institutes.

Nearly 200 innovative programs in advanced technology and industrial fields such as artificial intelligence, new materials, biotechnology, energy conservation and environmental protection, intelligent robots and Internet plus, are on display, more than 90 percent of them for the first time.

Black technology becomes popular

Being an important cradle of original innovations, Zhongguancun has attracted innovative elites among overseas returnees, college researchers and leading senior executives, which enables black technology -- newly invented hardware, software, techniques and materials that are hard to understand -- and hard technology such as artificial intelligence, gene technology, aerospace engineering and brain science, to become more and more applicable to people's lives.

During the week innovative achievements of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, SenseTime Technology, Beijing ZHZ Technology Co., Ltd and BeiGene will be on display. The intelligent video monitoring technology and face recognition technology invented by SenseTime Corporation may especially impress the audience.

The company's deep learning model, DeepID, gained a 99.15 percent face recognition rate in LFW (Labeled Faces in the Wild), a database for studying face recognition in unconstrained environments, and has become a benchmark in academic and industrial circles for recognition performance. The recognition rate of DeepID has surpassed that of Facebook and Google and is the first to go above 99 percent.

Zhongguancun has achieved a great deal in artificial intelligence, original innovative materials and biotechnological fields and has set 184 international standards.

Further integration of innovation and entrepreneurship

As innovation and entrepreneurship becomes more and more popular, leading enterprises, colleges, central enterprises, state-owned enterprises and top foreign-funded companies are joining the trend, incubating competitive innovative enterprises, encouraging integration of scientific and technological innovation and industries and committing to their own upgrading.

China Aerospace Science and Industry Corp. (CASI) and Aviation Industry Corporation of China established two platforms to serve innovation and entrepreneurship activities. The CASICloud sets "cloud manufacturing" as its core technology, combining "Internet" with "intelligent manufacturing" to offer information sharing and industrial chain services for industrial enterprises.

Shougang Chengyun, sponsored by Shougang Group -- a steel producer in China, focuses on developing intelligent parking 3D garages and automatic navigation systems to realize intelligent control of unmanned vehicles and parking.

Microsoft founded Microsoft Accelerator and Microsoft ARD in Zhongguancun, providing entrepreneurs with offices, training and financial support. The Accelerator and ARD have successfully incubated more than 100 innovative teams, of which 70 have internationally advanced competitiveness. The total value of assessment of the enterprises is up to 38 billion yuan ($ 5.7 billion).

Other leading private enterprises in China have also settled in Zhongguancun. Legend Star, built by Lenovo, is devoted to offering support to entrepreneurs through angel investment.

Xiaomi is developing a chain of products including portable power sources, cell phones and a Xiaomi air cleaner, which will add to the upgrading of manufacturing in China.

Fourteen academic institutions including Peking University, Tsinghua University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences have joined hands with more than 100 leading industrial enterprises to establish the Beijing Innovation Collaborative Institute (BICI) to do research and support innovative enterprises.

The leading enterprises and colleges try to encourage small enterprises to develop innovative technologies through resource sharing, organizational change and technical cooperation. Public service platforms simultaneously further develop exchanges with entrepreneurs.

Zhongguancun is entering a new age of innovation and entrepreneurship integration.

Supportive policies on encouraging innovations come into effect

The State Council and the Ministry of Public Security have put forward policies on talents' entry-exit affairs and the reform of commercial and industrial administration and industrial development in China to encourage innovation and entrepreneurship. The city of Beijing is also authorized to expand open experimental units to hasten the development of innovative and entrepreneurial enterprises.

In 2016, the Beijing government cooperated with the AECC Beijing Institute of Aeronautical Materials to establish a science and technology transfer platform, the Beijing Institute of Graphene Technology Co., LTD, intending to further promote the industrialization of graphene research achievements.

Meng Binglin, a graduate learning oil painting, chose to be a village official in Miyun, Beijing. He saw opportunities through the governmental policies and started a local products business, selling chestnuts, walnuts, honey and eggs produced in his village.

He set up a company named "Bu Lao Shangpin" which has spread to two towns and ten villages, and gained more than 5,000 clients. The company has helped the villagers' income increase by more than 10,000 yuan.