News

HSP: Evolving to urban innovation center

By Yang Cheng (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-09-13 08:26

Editor's note: Encouraged by reform policies of the early 1980s, scientists and researchers from Beijing's Haidian district began to quit their jobs. Leaving behind strict management systems, they started their own business on Zhongguancun electronics street. The area later became known as the Zhongguancun science zone, encompassing Haidian Science Park (HSP). Now park officials, experts and entrepreneurs are attending the ongoing Davos forum. Their opinions and experiences are shared on this special report from Sept 13 to 15.

After more than two decades of groundbreaking development, the Haidian Science Park (HSP) at the core of Zhongguancun Science Park is again evolving as it becomes an international urban center for innovation and an innovation downtown for Haidian district.

Covering 217 sq km - nearly half of Haidian district in the northwest of Beijing - the famed HSP is now laying plans to attract more world-level enterprises and offer fertile ground for top-quality personnel to transform from an innovation park into an urban area dedicated to knowledge, invention and new ideas.

"With the thriving development of global scientific innovation, fostering innovative urban centers is a widely recognized national development strategy throughout the world," said Zhao Fengtong, Party secretary of the Zhongguancun Science Park.

The latest goals for the HSP are to be another chapter in its history of groundbreaking developments at Zhongguancun.

In 1987, a story on "Electronic Street" in Zhongguancun published in the People's Daily first pushed the district into the limelight. The story described development of the area and for the first time recognized its innovation and development potential. The park was then approved as the first national high-tech zone in 1988.

In 2009, the HSP was defined as the core area of Zhongguancun National Innovation Model Park, an indication that planners want the HSP to lead the nation into a new era for China's high-tech parks.

The HSP has twice been selected as the experimental and pivotal area for the nation's development of innovation.

"Currently, it is a savvy strategy that the leading park positions itself as an urban innovation center," said Luis Sanz, director general of the International Association of Science Parks, at the first International Symposium on Regional Innovation for Downtown (Haidian) of the Zhongguancun National Innovation Model Park in May this year.

Echoing Sanz, Zhao, who used to serve as the first deputy director of HSP in the late 1980s, noted that developing such an urban center is a strategic step in the Chinese government's efforts to build an innovation-focused country "and sets a new target for the core area of Zhongguancun Science Park".

A high-level meeting scheduled this month will discuss the latest plans and efforts to foster more innovation-focused enterprises with international influence.

The vision calls for HSP to become a concentrated center of state-of-the-art technology and standards with independent intellectual property rights.