Budding entrepreneurs win awards in international contest
Six winners were chosen out of 17 projects at the finals of the seventh China Xiamen Overseas Entrepreneurship Competition (United Kingdom division), which concluded at the University of Cambridge in midMarch.
Wang Junxin won first prize, with a project for photovoltaic system integrating energy storage, lighting adjustment and temperature control designed for buildings.
The winners all said they expected to use the competition as a platform to implement their projects in Xiamen, East China’s Fujian province, and realize long-term development.
During the competition, contestants introduced innovation highlights and business plans of their respective projects. Experts reviewed each project in multiple aspects such as technologies, market prospects and business models.
Chen Bin, a senior investment manager at Fortune Capital, a renowned Chinese private equity company, said the quality of this year’s projects has improved compared with previous iterations.
“Many of the contestants are students from overseas universities. They insist on planning and promoting innovation from an international perspective, and the projects also have good commercial potential,” Chen said.
Launched in November 2023, the UK competition has attracted 71 projects, an increase of more than 5 percent over the previous session.
It was guided by the Xiamen special office of high-level talent introduction and the management committee of Xiamen Torch Development Zone for High Technology Industries, and co-hosted by Xiamen High-tech Innovation Center and relevant local parties such as the Oxford Chinese Students and Scholars Association and the Cambridge Chinese Community Centre.
The torch zone set up an advisory group and a service team to provide a one-on-one service for the contestants. The group — of which members include academicians from the Royal Academy of Engineering, the head of the Chinese Association of Financial Executives, senior executives of multinational enterprises, and professors from prestigious colleges and universities — aims to offer professional evaluation and consultancy for the contestants.
The service team helps the contestants allocate resources in such fields as financial support, technology matchmaking and supporting facilities.
Since the competition highlighted competitive industries in the UK and key emerging industries in Xiamen, about 80 percent of the projects were related to biomedicine, the new generation of information technology, intelligent manufacturing, new energy and new materials.
Some of them will be considered as candidates for Xiamen’s talent development program and included in the torch zone’s potential talent projects, according to organizers.
Representatives of the torch zone watched the final competition via video link. They also promoted the talent development environment and favorable policies of Xiamen and the zone at the award ceremony, inviting scientific and technological talents from the UK to innovate and start businesses in Xiamen.
Ding Mingqin, minister counsellor for science and technology affairs of the Chinese embassy in the United Kingdom, attended the event in person.
In addition to the UK, the China Xiamen Overseas Entrepreneurship Competition has expanded its footprint to the United States, Singapore, Russia and Germany after seven years of development.
It has also become a calling card of the torch zone to attract talent and projects that would support the industrial development of Xiamen.
As of now, the event has attracted a total of more than 1,000 projects and nurtured nearly 150 projects qualified for Xiamen’s talent development program.
Yunmao Technology, one of the projects, has contributed key production technologies to the country’s independent innovation and development of semiconductor and integrated circuits.
Based in Xiamen, the company is now a leading multidisciplinary fullstack thin film deposition solution provider in the country, providing customers with a full range of technological solutions and advanced thin film deposition equipment for nanomaterials.
The Xiamen torch zone will focus on the local industries’ needs in internationalization. It will strengthen measures and increase efforts to access more international resources and inject fresh momentum into Xiamen’s development of new quality productive forces, according to the management committee.