Innovation contest opens registration
Writer: Han Ximin, Zhou Ting | Editor: Stephanie Yang | From: Shenzhen Daily
Registration for the Fourth China (Shenzhen) International Innovation & Entrepreneurship Competition has been officially launched, offering 9.83 million yuan (US$1.40 million) in awards to overseas contestants.
Until the Feb. 29 deadline, contestants can register on the official website of the contest, http://www.itcsz.cn.
The contest will start in March and includes preliminaries in seven cities in seven countries. The 100 winning projects in the preliminary contests will compete for the top awards in the profession contest final, industry contest final and overall final to be held in April in Shenzhen. Individual contestants will have a chance at a combined award of 1.4 million yuan.
For the entire contest, from the overseas preliminaries to the finals in China, the organizer — Shenzhen’s human resources and social security bureau — will give out 9.83 million yuan in awards, it announced in a release yesterday.
The preliminaries will be held in Madrid, Sydney, Toronto, Berlin, Tokyo, Silicon Valley and London.
In addition to the original five major industries in the competition, namely the Internet, advanced manufacturing, electronic technology, biology and life sciences, and materials and energy, the organizer has added Internet of Things and artificial intelligence to the competition.
The contestants will gain exposure to 40 well-known investment institutions which form a venture capital pool totaling 20 billion yuan that will make portfolio investments in the outstanding projects at the competition.
The contests in the three previous years attracted 5,135 projects from 89 countries. In the 1,850 projects that signed up for the contest in 2019, 52 percent of the project leaders, or 956 people, were doctoral degree holders who owned 772 patent rights or other IPRs.
Among the 350 projects that made it to the finals, 120 reached cooperation agreements with the city’s industrial parks and 38 settled in Shenzhen for future development.
The winners in this year’s finals will be awarded at the opening of the Conference on International Exchange of Professionals at the Shenzhen Convention and Exhibition Center in April.