Innovation is GREAT: the UK makes an impression as Country of Honour at Pujiang Innovation Forum

If I had to sum up the work of SIN China over the past couple of weeks in one word, it would be ‘monumental’ – referring to both the scale of the programme we ran, and the scale of the opportunity it demonstrated for the UK to work with China on innovation.

The UK was invited to be Country of Honour at the Pujiang Innovation Forum in Shanghai, China’s leading innovation conference, and the UK’s Science Minister Jo Johnson and Government Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Mark Walport both attended. Working with colleagues in the British Consulate General Shanghai, British Council, Research Councils UK and the Department for International Trade, we took the opportunity to run a UK-China Innovation is GREAT Showcase event alongside the Pujiang Innovation Forum, incorporating workshops in space, energy, Internet of Things and digital manufacturing, graphene (with Nobel Laureate Kostya Novoselov) and the creative economy. The UK delegation of speakers and experts from academia, industry and Research Councils numbered over 150, and the Showcase, which was opened by Chinese Science Minister Wan Gang, attracted over 600 high level Chinese contacts.

During his visit, Jo Johnson also held the Joint Commission on Science and Innovation meeting with Wan Gang, where they agreed future priorities and celebrated the progress to date on the Newton Fund in China, which has committed £200m across 37 joint programmes since 2014. He visited Suzhou, where he announced the development of the Oxford Suzhou Centre for Advanced Research (OSCAR), a new centre in the Suzhou Industrial Park (SIP) dedicated to research and innovation. And he also opened the Centre of Excellence for Plant and Microbial Sciences, a joint centre between the UK’s John Innes Centre and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. These were just the highlights – 25 new partnerships came out of the visit.

What really came across in the midst of all this activity was the sheer scale of the opportunity and the appetite to work together. There are of course many existing, successful collaborations between the UK and China in science and innovation, which we saw evidence of at the Pujiang Forum and the Showcase event. But with China’s renewed emphasis on innovation as the key driver of economic growth in the 13th Five Year Plan, and with the UK’s strong research base and position as the most innovative country in the G20 in the Global Innovation Index, there is potential to do so much more.

You can read more on our website here (English) and here (Chinese), and you can read some of the media coverage of the visit here:

UK researchers tap into China’s scientific powerhouse (BBC)

UK leads in partnership with China in innovation (Shanghai Daily)

Research collaboration a key to global partnership between China and UK (Shanghai Daily – Op ed)

And Chinese language coverage in China Science Daily, The Paper, CBN TV, Xinhuanet.

Main photo credit: Ben Peng