Last week, we announced that Kambria has been selected as one of the “Canal Elite” talent programs and will partner with the Hangzhou government in China to accelerate technology development in the region. This article provides additional insights about Hangzhou and the talent program.
Hangzhou, capital of East China's Zhejiang province, has dramatically grown from a tourist-oriented town to an emerging city with a strong digital economy. Hangzhou’s citizens are fiercely proud of its innovative reputation and the fact that it is on the way to becoming a completely cashless society.
Behind the scenes, Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba plays a huge role this modernization and its vast compound in Hangzhou is a testament to the direction in which the city is heading. Alibaba’s nine buildings are set over a campus measuring 300,000 square meters, with a large wetland park situated in the center – a far cry from the gridlocked traffic just a few hundred meters away.
In 2018, Hangzhou unveiled an ambitious plan to become China's foremost city in terms of the digital economy, focusing on three major development paths -- industrialization of digital resources, digitalization of industries, and digitalization of urban areas. To this end, Hangzhou will focus on the innovation and application of digital technologies and increase support for major platforms and projects.
Aside from its booming digital economy, Hangzhou has also experienced strong growth in its regional GDP over the past 70 years, which increased from 255 million yuan in 1949 to 1.35 trillion yuan in 2018, a factor of 945.8, making it the 10th Chinese city to join the trillion-yuan GDP club last year.
This strong economic growth is one of the primary reasons the government built the Hangzhou International Talent Entrepreneur & Innovation Park (HITEIP). As the first of its kind in China, HITEIP focuses on introducing global, high-level talents to technologies, projects and funding in order to develop a batch of wholly foreign-owned or Sino-foreign equity joint venture high-tech enterprises and financial institutions.
In recent years, Hangzhou has already introduced 25,000 high-level overseas returnees and 15,000 foreign talents. Foreigners have registered or have legal rights to more than 4,980 enterprises, mainly in information, bio-medicine, business management, and trade.
Before the Chinese Lunar New Year, Kambria’s co-founder and CEO, Dr. Thuc Vu, visited HITEIP where we introduced Kambria’s Open-Innovation-As-A-Service and expressed the goal and determination to help local companies in Hangzhou innovate together.
Mr. Robin, Director of HITEIP, said the local government will spare no effort to support Kambria China with abundant resources such as connecting local enterprises and universities to Kambria’s open innovation platform, hosting provincial-level conferences, and supporting hackathons to accelerate the development of innovation, artificial intelligence, and robotics.
We are very excited about the potential of Kambria China and our partnership with HITEIP. We will work closely with other Canal Elite programs to foster further innovation in the region and to accelerate artificial intelligence and robotics technology via the Kambria platform. Please stay tuned for updates on our progress. Join our Telegram Channel to be among the first to know.
