Spirit of Nobel fires up innovation exchange
Beijing team wins a grand-prize study trip to Sweden
Young entrepreneurs from China and Sweden had an opportunity to show their talent for technological innovation at the first Nobel Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition this month.
The competition, which ran from Dec 6 to 8, was intended to promote the international exchange of academic and technological innovation between Swedish and Chinese university students in the fields of new energy, new materials, artificial intelligence, big data and other areas of cutting-edge technology.
The winner of the grand prize went to a project team from Beijing Sunlectric Technological Company established by graduates from Tsinghua University. The group was awarded a summer study trip to Sweden at the renowned Lund University, and an English-language course with Education First in Shanghai in 2018.
The project focused on producing an efficient and affordable solar photovoltaic power-generation terminal through the use of flexible crystalline silicon technology.
“We were motivated by the appreciation from the judges of the competition to keep up our endeavors on advocating the concept of low-carbon and environmental protection,” says Liu Jie, one of the four copartners of the company.
Liu says the technology and strategies from other teams inspired her group to further improve their product’s quality.
“More factories will be established to lower the production costs and to help promote the utilization of clean energy, like solar energy, in daily life,” says Liu.
A team from Xi’an Jiaotong University won first prize for their design of a lower-limb rehabilitation robot based on a human-computer interface. The robot was created to help patients suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a progressive nervous system disease, to maintain good communication with the outside world through an interactive system assisted with electroencephalography, or an electrophysiological monitoring method to record electrical activity of the brain.
The second prize was won by a team from Fudan University who developed a cloud platform for an adjuvant therapy system using AI and computer vision technology to reduce the misdiagnosis rate.
The third prize was awarded to a team from Nanjing University for their project offering innovative video solutions through the use of AI algorithms to ultimately enhance the human visual experience.
The Nobel Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition was jointly organized by the Consulate General of Sweden, Shanghai Jiaotong University and Shanghai Yangpu district government.
Among the 12 teams competing in the final, nine were from Chinese universities, including Shanghai Jiaotong University, Fudan University, Tsinghua University, Peking University, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Nanjing University and Zhejiang University, and three Swedish teams from the Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg and the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.
“We hope to stimulate more innovation and entrepreneurship in the spirit of Nobel, or rather, the Nobel Prize,” says Lisette Lindahl, consul-general of the Consulate General of the Kingdom of Sweden in Shanghai.
“Any technological innovation is popularized by commercialization and industrialization to profit the society. It is in the same sense that Nobel left his fortune to establish the Nobel Prize, which is to reward those who have made the greatest contribution to mankind.”
Lindahl says the exchange between Sweden and China could help to find creative solutions to many common problems affecting society, whether they be environment challenges, elderly care, health problems or energy issues.
China has taken a stride forward in encouraging innovation and entrepreneurship.
At a State Council executive meeting in August, Premier Li Keqiang said that the country must give full play to the role of innovation in spurring entrepreneurship and employment, and speed up the transformation of innovation into real productivity.
A guideline on encouraging entrepreneurship, the first of its kind, was released by the Communist Party of China Central Committee and the State Council in September.
The document acknowledges an appreciation of the significant role entrepreneurship plays in national economic progress, and promises to establish a supportive environment for it to prosper.
It also advocates the promotion of the entrepreneurial spirit, which includes hard work, the pursuit of excellence, craftsmanship, innovation and social responsibility.