Expert group promotes industry-university-research co-op in Wuxi

Wuxi Xinwu district, Jiangsu province, held an industry-university-research cooperation activity on Aug 6, which was also a 10th anniversary celebration of the Technology Town Chief Group project.

Previous Technology Town Chief Group members were invited to attend the activity to join in discussions of ways to combine technology and industry and promote innovation and development.

The Technology Town Chief Group project is a strategy of the Jiangsu provincial government developed in 2008 that aims to accelerate technology transfer and promote innovation-driven development.

The group is composed of selected professors and doctors from the province's colleges and universities who are assigned to certain government positions in local towns, villages or development areas.

Wuxi Xinwu district started implementing the project in 2012. Since then, 34 members from 21 top universities and research institutes nationwide and 13 provincial government departments have brought resources and technologies to the district and regarded it as their second hometown.

Over the past six years, experts and professors from over 60 domestic universities have been invited to give lectures under the program. More than 20 universities have struck cooperation deals with the district, where an online platform of incubators has been established. A large number of deals on technology transfer have been inked.

All these results are attributed in whole or in part to the efforts of members of the Technology Town Chief Group.

Moreover, the group has helped attract talented personnel by organizing hundreds of talent summits and innovation and entrepreneurship salons, promoting the establishment of innovation and entrepreneurship associations and research centers, and recommending top minds to work or start up businesses in the district.

Also, the group helped develop the district's pillar new-generation information technology industry, including helping host integrated circuit (IC), talent and design summits, building an electronic design automation (EDA) platform for IC design, establishing a national IC design industrial park, and bringing in top IC design companies like Will Semiconductor.

In the first half of 2018, the district's GDP increased 8.3 percent year on year, ranking first in the city of Wuxi.