Max von Zedtwitz was in Beijing recently to promote the book, Created in China: How China Is Becoming a Global Innovator. WANG ZHUANGFEI/CHINA DAILY
A new book says a growing army of engineers is helping China advance in cutting-edge technologies
Max von Zedtwitz believes the Chinese may not only be the first to land a person on Mars but also the first to cure cancer.
The managing director of the Center for Global R & D Management and Innovation (in short, Glorad), a research and development think tank, says the sheer number of science and engineering graduates being churned out by Chinese universities could dramatically speed up innovation.
While it took 200 years to move from the steam engine to the Internet, there could be major breakthroughs in what are now considered frontiers of science in just a matter of decades, he says.
"Innovation is to some extent a numbers game. If you just have one idea per 1,000 people, then a country that has a 1.4 billion population is going to have an advantage over anyone else."
Von Zedtwitz was recently in Beijing to promote his new book, Created in China: How China Is Becoming a Global Innovator, which he has co-written with Georges Haour, a professor of technology and innovation management at the IMD Business School in Switzerland.
The book was released in January.
Although now based in San Francisco, the 46-year-old Swiss is no stranger to China. His think tank is partly based in Shanghai, and he has spent a large part of the past decade as associate professor of innovation management at Tsinghua University in the Chinese capital.
"What we wanted to get across in the book was the impact of all the agents and actors involved in innovation in China, including the government, the education system and the companies," he says.
"Outside of China, all the focus is on the big companies like Huawei and Alibaba that are global leaders, but what is not always seen is the role smaller companies are now playing in innovation."
The book points out that China is to increase fivefold the proportion of GDP it devotes to innovation from 0.5 percent in 1995 to 2.5 percent by 2020. This will involve the need for 3.7 million scientists working in research and development.
Currently, the figure is the same as Europe, 2 percent－despite the European Union setting a target of 3 percent in 2007. This has resulted in a 17 percent annual increase in patents in China since 2005 with applications reaching 2 million in 2014－three times as many as that of the United States, although importantly, a smaller proportion is of higher-quality invention patents.
Currently, 31 percent of undergraduate degrees in China are in engineering compared with 5 percent in the US, and by 2030 the country aims to have 200 million college graduates.
