World’s top universities look to Hong Kong and rest of Greater Bay Area to foster innovation and technology talent
“In the next 10 years, where will be the major centres for science and technology?” he asked. “US and China. We are in the Middle East or West Asia, and we’ve got to hedge our bets, we’ve got to be invested.”
Chan added that many Saudis could speak fluent Chinese and highlighted that the country’s high schools were required to teach two hours of Chinese a week.
He was speaking as university presidents on Wednesday gathered for the second Global Innovation and Technology Summit in Hong Kong on Wednesday, organised by the Greater Bay Area Association of Academicians.
The event at the Hong Kong Science Park in Pak Shek Kok brought together dozens of senior government officials and academics from Hong Kong, mainland China and overseas to discuss how to boost I&T development through higher education.
The Greater Bay Area is Beijing’s plan to integrate Hong Kong, Macau and nine mainland cities into an economic powerhouse.
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Tan Eng Chye, the president of the National University of Singapore, said his institution had started to send students to Silicon Valley and other innovation hotspots around the world for internships in 2002 to increase the exposure of its students to entrepreneurship.
“When you talk about research and innovation, industry has to come in,” he said.
The university has also sent students to the mainland, including Shanghai, Beijing and Shenzhen, with Guangzhou to be added to the list of about 20 places to increase their exposure to the bay area.
Tan added about 4,000 students who had gone through the programme had graduated in the last 20 years.
He said they had founded more than 1,100 companies and two of them had become unicorns – privately owned start-ups valued at more than US$1 billion.
“We have a very structured collaboration with industry to train our students and graduates, and they come back and build an ecosystem within Singapore,” Tan added.
Fang Jianming, the deputy commissioner of the Office of the Commissioner of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Hong Kong used the summit to highlight Chinese President Xi Jinping’s emphasis on “new quality productive forces”.
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“The economy counts on technology, the technology counts on talent and talent counts on education,” Fang said. “Amid the fierce competition for talent worldwide, Hong Kong should increase its attractiveness with even more preferential policies, a more solid foundation in the industry and a more diverse platform for innovation.”
Secretary for Innovation, Technology, and Industry Sun Dong underlined the city’s determination to expand its I&T talent pool, seen as crucial to the city’s development into an international hub for the sector.
Sun said better collaboration among government and the academic and research sectors was one of the key strategies required to reach the goal.
He also revealed that the research, academic, and industry sectors one-plus scheme, launched last October to encourage the commercialisation of research, had last week approved about 20 proposals out of 94 applications.