Recently, the State Council issued the 13th Five-year Plan on National Scientific and Technological Innovation, explicitly putting forward the guidance, general requirement, strategic tasks and reform measures for China’s scientific and technological innovation for next five years. The country should support Beijing and Shanghai to build scientific and technological innovation centers with international clout, promote the innovative development of national innovation demonstration zones as well as new and hi-tech development zones, set up a batch of innovative provinces and cities and regional innovation centers with strong demonstration effect, and advance comprehensive reform pilot in a systemic way, according to the plan.
The Plan consists of 27 chapters, requiring setting up national innovation system in terms of innovation bodies, innovation bases, innovation space, innovation network, innovation management and innovation ecosystem, and making systematic deployment on developing first mover advantage, strengthening original innovation ability, expanding innovation development potential, propelling popular entrepreneurship and innovation, fully deepening scientific and technological system reform and reinforcing development of science popularization and innovative culture.
The Plan draws blueprint of scientific and technological innovation development and sets overall target for the scientific and technological innovation during next five years. China should make significant improvement in scientific and technological strength and innovation ability, and national comprehensive innovation ability ranks top 15 in the world to be an innovation-oriented country; remarkable achievements should be made in innovation-driven development with contribution rate of technology progress increasing from 55.3 percent to 60 percent and proportion of added value of knowledge-intensive service industry among GDP up from 15.6 percent to 20 percent; scientific and technological ability will be improved greatly the number of patent applications submitted via Patent Cooperation Treaty doubles when compared with 2015 and R&D input ratio will reach 2.5 percent.
“What does it mean ranking No.15? It means that the country is acknowledged by the world as an innovation-oriented country. And the two numerical values are important indicators balancing whether industries of a country move towards higher value chain.” says an official from the Ministry of Science and Technology. The official explains that this Plan is one of the 22 national major Plan determined by the State Council, as well as the detailed implementation of outline of the 13th Five-year Plan and Outline of China’s Innovation-driven Development Strategy.
To this end, the Plan proposes in its 11th chapter to give full scope to local areas in regional innovation, optimize development arrangement, make innovations in systems and mechanisms, pool innovation resources together, strive to be ahead in regional innovation, and drive up the overall level of regional innovation.
In the eyes of Lv Wei, head of the Techno-economic Research Department of the Development Research Center, the Plan builds a system for hierarchical construction of regional innovation. According to Lv, the first level is to build scientific and technological innovation centers with international clout in megacities like Beijing and Shanghai. The second level is to promote the innovative development of national innovation demonstration zones as well as new and hi-tech development zones. The third level is to set up a batch of innovative provinces and cities and regional innovation centers with strong demonstration effect. The fourth level is to advance comprehensive reform pilot in a systemic way. As stated by Lv, “Imbalanced regional development is seen across China. The big gap among factors, arrangement and innovation ability makes it impossible for quick march. Therefore, measures must be adjusted to local conditions to create favorable environment for innovation and build diversified regional innovation systems”.
Chen Jing, head of the research center for technological innovation and professor of the school of Economics and Management of Tsinghua University, indicated that the highlights in the Plan are that it regards supporting comprehensive transformation and upgrading as a basic task, focuses on improving original innovation ability, strives for the coordination of national innovation system, regional innovation system and industry innovation system, explores the construction of an open and sharing innovation and entrepreneurship platform.
Xu Jing, director of the Department of Innovation and Development at the Ministry of Science and Technology, held that the Plan makes full-chain design for original innovation, technology innovation and industrialization. The Plan proposes that an R&D plan should be jointly contributed by the upstream basic research, midstream technology innovation and the downstream technology popularization and industrialization, while in the past, they are separated in different R&D plans.
Translated by Jennifer Lu and Vanessa Chen
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