The sons and daughters of invention
Given the challenge of coming up with innovative products or practices, thousands of young people went to work during a 7-month competition, ultimately producing a new flock of entrepreneurs, Chen Meiling reports.
There were a total of 1,707 teams, a figure whittled down to just 33 over seven months, before just four emerged triumphant. They won medals for coming up with the most promising innovative projects.
Over those seven months, young entrepreneurs throughout the country had dazzled judges of the first “Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei and Guangdong-Macao-Hong Kong” youth innovation and entrepreneurship competition with their ingenuity and innovative projects. These included eye patches said to ease depression and insomnia; DNA technology for identifying criminal-suspects; underwater robots that can gather sea cucumbers; and remotely controlled indoor gardens. The contest was held during the 2018 National Mass Innovation and Entrepreneurship Week.
The contest organizers, Tsinghua University and the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Education Alliance of China, held its final and the awards ceremony in Beijing last month.
Winning prizes is not the end of the story for the competitors. The next big test is to see if they can turn their projects into profitable business propositions.
Liu Xiaopeng of the Institute for Electronics and Information Technology in Tianjin, Tsinghua University, says he has been able to amass 20 million yuan ($3 million) in revenue since he set up Tianjin United AI Technology nine months ago.
The 24-year-old’s invention is a device that monitors for sounds that can alert the likes of railway operators, airlines, ship owners and those with other large mechanical equipment to impending breakdowns.
The application and the moneymaking potential of Liu’s invention becomes apparent when you consider just the savings in labor costs for railway operators, who need to get staff to physically check for abnormalities. Liu’s invention deletes those expensive humans from the financial equation. It also reduces their propensity to make incorrect judgments based on such factors as weather, motions and experience.
His business partners include several air-conditioner manufacturers, an artificial-intelligence company and railway companies, Liu says.
“The aim of entrepreneurship is to solve three problems: human resources, funding and sales.”
To enlist eight graduates from Tsinghua University to join his startup, Liu turned into a veritable kebab-consumption machine. Each time he met somebody he wanted to enlist, the chosen fare for socializing was kebabs.
“I must have eaten kebabs 100 times, given that each time I met somebody I had a dozen of them. After all, you have to become friends with these people (before they decide to become involved financially).”
Passion and struggles
Three top contest winners are involved in new materials, demonstrating the country’s emphasis on this emerging industry.
The gold medal winner, for instance, was Cui Jianxun and his team of Flance (Beijing) Nanotechnology, which makes innovative nano materials used in military applications, electronic information, flexible displays and biological medicine.
About 85 percent of medium and high-end materials in China are imported, but with Flance’s method, manufacturers can reduce the cost of such materials by about 80 percent, says Cui, chief executive of the 5-year-old company.
It will turn in a profit in excess 10 million yuan a year, Cui says.
Yet entrepreneurship is never simply a matter of a eureka moment. It involves hard work, failures, frustration and humility. Those working on the project got used to very long days, leaving the office later than 8 pm and sometimes sticking around until 10 pm.
“There were challenges all the time, but we were able to rise to them because we are full of passion,” Cui says.
Another candidate, Ma Xiangyang, a student at Minzu University of China, agrees.
When the 21-year-old first learned tie-dyeing from an 80-year-old woman in Yunnan province, he felt embarrassed as the only man in the group working on textiles. But he persisted. “(It was) a completely new life experience for me,” Ma says.
Ma and his team members finally succeeded in finding a new formula for dyeing materials to create color gradients — unlike the traditional tie-dyeing methods that show even colors, they could reveal various complex shades and layers of colors. His team had already taken orders valued at 1 million yuan before the contest.
His team’s tie-dyeing program was the only cultural-creativity project in the final. He says his expectations for success were low.
“I really wanted to find some innovators and people with more management experience,” says Ma.
The 20-year-old twin sisters, who are students from Hainan University, Li Junjun and Li Jiajia, had a bittersweet experience in the final.
They were a bit upset when the judges gave low marks for their agricultural project, a new type of fodder that helps chickens grow faster, boosts immunity and yields better meat.
But that sadness was short-lived, as the pair was stopped in a corridor later by an incubator operator, who has expressed interest in their project.
Their team has provided 1,000 free chicks a year to 103 families in poverty in Lemei village, Hainan province, to promote poverty relief in the region.
The project is said to have increased the farmers’ income by a total of 2.15 million yuan.
“We visited the farms and persuaded farmers to use our products. Even though we were not paid anything, seeing their happy faces gave us a strong sense of achievement,” says Li Junjun with a smile.
Tips for starters
Gold-medal winner Cui Jianxun offers advice for would-be entrepreneurs: “They need to have a clear long-term goal, but that does not mean they need to have a perfect product or a perfect team before entering the market.
“After all, entrepreneurship itself is imperfect.”
Sun Hongbin, secretary-general of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Education Alliance of China, one of the organizers, says the event’s aim is not to cultivate huge unicorns but to encourage young people to have courage, innovative ideas, leadership and cross-sector learning capacity.
“Education is the basis of innovation and entrepreneurship. Our goal is to cultivate talent, and then comes great companies,” Sun says.
One judge, Ding Hongwei, who’s a supervisor of the Master of Business Administration at the University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, lauds the projects and those behind them. He says the quality was high, and participation came from many fields.
“The projects filled some gaps in industries and met real demands in the market. But participants need to better understand competitors at a global level.”
Another judge, Li Zhu, who’s a partner of the Innoangel Fund Team, urges candidates to pay attention to intellectual property and market scale.
“If the market scale of an industry is less than 10 billion yuan, it makes little sense to start a business, and if you cannot do 10 times better than others, there is no point in chasing frontrunners,” Li says.
Zhao Hao, an investment manager at Sky Saga Capital, says the contest presents investors with an opportunity to find good projects and for project managers to show off their work.
Some will get support from the government and some will find business partners.
Ma Hongyan, a teacher at Tianjin University of Science and Technology, suggests students find a balance between academic study and entrepreneurship, and not act on blind impulses.
But perhaps the most succinct and best piece of advice came from one of the bronze-medal winners this year, Zhang Hualin, co-founder of Shenzhen Shenqing New Materials, which won with its fast-charging, long-life lithium battery.
“It’s not easy to set up your own business,” he says.
“But if you’re determined to do it, you’ll never regret it.”