Top ideas are Inno-China winners

Zhu Yajun and Yang Wenjie

The finals of entrepreneurship competition “Inno-China 2019,” sponsored by the Shanghai Jiading Advanced Technology Innovation & Business Incubator, were held in Jiading recently.

In its seventh year, 128 projects from around the world signed up for the competition, with only 12 selected for the shortlist.

They covered a variety of sectors, including new materials, biomedicine, artificial intelligence and advanced manufacturing.

Five projects, each with the vision to be industrialized and marketized, were presented with a special prize.

A photoelectric color sorter developed by a Shanghai team, which is used to sift out certain particles in industrial processes, can handle the materials at least 17.6 times faster per unit than the current standard. It can also learn to sort items it has never sorted before.

A team from Canada’s

Waterloo entered a blood purification project which allows patients with kidney problems to be treated at home, saving cost and effort.

Since 2013, winners have obtained financing ranging from 500,000 (US$70,653) to 10 million yuan through the competition. Some have settled and are thriving in the incubator.

A team from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore got investment in 2016 with their cleaning technology and began to develop in the incubator. It is now in cooperation with major Chinese enterprises such as Haier and SAIC Motor.

It is what sets the Advanced Technology Innovation & Business Incubator apart from other similar platforms as well. The incubator recruits hard-core technologies from around the globe and digs in.

The incubator now has 12 public technology service platforms concerning biomedicine, smart manufacturing, energy-saving, environment protection, industrial design and others and houses about 300 firms.