TMCnet News

SIP: Attracting Academics and Entrepreneurs in Equal Measure
[September 18, 2014]

SIP: Attracting Academics and Entrepreneurs in Equal Measure


SUZHOU, China --(Business Wire)--

World-class universities are opening campuses and research facilities in Suzhou Industrial Park (SIP) and helping create some of the most cutting edge companies on earth.

Since the Suzhou Dushu Lake Science & Education Innovation District was set up in 2002, it has attracted a number of research and training institutes and 25 prestigious universities to this eastern corner of Suzhou -- among them the University of California, Los Angles (UCLA), Australia's Monash University and The National University of Singapore.

Foreign and Chinese universities have also teamed up in joint-ventures such as Xi'an Jiaotong University and England's Liverpool University, while a number of China's own top-class tertiary institutions have set up campuses including Renmin University and the China University of Science and Technology.

More than half of the graduates receive job offers by the time they finish their degrees, according to Jiang Weiming, executive vice chairman of the Dushu Lake Science & Education Innovation District. Among the remainder some choose to venture out on their own and start up companies.

This combination of top universities, aspiring students and innovative businesses is what Barry Yang, SIP's chairman, hopes will trigger "chemical reactions." By creating an environment where both research and business can flourish, he explains, the park has become a major tech hub where undergraduate and graduate students, researchers and chief executives alike can benefit from an ecosystem where the cross-pollination of ideas and talent can create state-of-the-art innovation.

"At the very beginning SIP was about training the manpower; but now the focus is on more than just education-it's about creating an innovation hub," Yang says. Today researchers in the park are probing diverse subject matters, from the use of microwave devices for satellite communication systems, to carbon dioxide conversion and 3D sound.

It has been a constant process of evolution over the last two decades as SIP has moved from developing infrastructure and attracting foreign direct investment to building top universities and high-tech start-up companies. Initially the universities were designed to help educate a wave of new workers to service China's domestic services industry in fields such as finance, marketing, and research and development.

At first the institutes and universities offered bachelor and graduate degrees but hae gradually broadened their menu of courses offering advanced programs such as Masters of Business Administration (MBAs) and Masters of Public Administration (MPAs).



Lucy Wensheng Zhou, the operation director of the SIP-UCLA Institute for Technology Advancement, says business development and innovation is scaling rapidly in its area of interest, which includes multimedia, big data, cloud computing with mobile internet applications, medical and biological information processing and imaging, environmental technology, new materials and new energy and urban planning.

The institute's incubator program for tech start-ups, which was launched just ten months ago, is ramping up quickly, she says, with the addition of one or two new tenant companies on average per month. And typically tenants at the institute manage to break even within six months.


"In China and in SIP we are seeing entrepreneurship and innovation increasingly given priority and the barriers to entry are being lowered," Zhou says. "The whole ecosystem is constantly improving."

Xu Guoqin, a professor and the director of the National University of Singapore's Suzhou Research Institute (NUSRI), gives some of the credit for that to the early collaboration between Singapore and China. He argues that the blend of China operations and Singaporean management styles has given SIP an edge over its competitors.

"All of the top management trained in Singapore and the park follows international practices," Xu explains. "Because of this, we at NUSRI have always felt very comfortable here."

Xu also points to the openness of the industrial park, which recently built a church to accommodate the wishes of some of its tenants. "It shows they are committed to accommodating different cultures and religions," he says. "It shows that SIP has an open mindset." He adds that currently the industrial park is also encouraging the universities to broaden their course offerings in the arts and humanities.

Bruce Weber, dean of The Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics at the University of Delaware argues that higher education has proven to be a catalyst for economic development and says the kind of synergies created in places like SIP create new opportunities for growth.

"Graduates are skilled employees [and] universities produce intellectual property that should be commercialized close to the source of the ideas," he says.

That kind of commercialization is happening at SIP, according to Zhang Xijun, the president of Nanopolis, a nano-tech support hub within the park, noting that there is a growing number of companies that have been founded by professors. Zhang calls the phenomenon "corre-location"-where enterprises and academia are linked not just by ideas but by geography.

Youmin Xi, a professor and the executive president of Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (XJTLU) and Pro-Vice-chancellor of the University of Liverpool, says both sides benefit from this kind of cooperation.

"SIP has created a desired research environment for experts and research teams to start their work freely and creatively," he says. "This is a win-win outcome for both institutions of higher learning and enterprises."

Institutions like XJTLU have had no difficulty recruiting talent to Suzhou. When it opened in 2006, David O'Connor, a world-class proteomics expert with an impressive record of research, academic leadership and management, stepped up to become head of XJTLU's department of biological sciences.

O'Connor says SIP has attracted some excellent universities and that in his own department there is real expertise in molecular biosciences, in particular. "If you put these together it's quite a formidable combination," he says. "I think we can do some interesting new things."

SIP chairman Yang could not agree more and believes SIP will continue to create the kind of "chemical reactions" necessary for innovation and change. "We have combined more than twenty universities with over 20,000 start-ups along with 80,000 students and faculty. Hopefully this dedicated education zone can provide more talent, more companies and more R&D."

But Yang isn't resting on his laurels and says there is work to be done every day of the year.

"We see so many industrial parks in China catching up, we need to continue to take the lead," he says. "If we stop somebody else might leapfrog us. It's not time to be complacent."

NUSRI's Xu confirms there is always room for improvement. "The current focus at SIP is on technology transfer, innovation and knowledge-to-enterprise (encouraging firms to have independent intellectual property), but the park must always pay attention to how to create this knowledge," he says. "Frontier R&D is the key to creating a global technology hub."


[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]