Global innovation contest opens registration

Writer: Han Ximin  |  Editor: Stephanie Yang  |  From: Shenzhen Daily  |  Updated: 2021-09-01

Registration for the Fifth China (Shenzhen) International Innovation & Entrepreneurship Competition starts today, which offers a total of 10.71 million yuan (US$1.66 million) in awards to contestants. An individual winner could have a chance to receive an award up to 1.35 million yuan.

Interested contestants can register via the contest’s official website at http://www.itcsz.cn, its organizer, the Shenzhen Municipal Human Resources and Social Security Bureau, said yesterday.

Registration deadline is Oct. 15 and overseas preliminaries will be held in October and November.

The finals will be held in Shenzhen in December.

Longhua District will co-host the competition together with Longgang and Bao’an districts, the organizer said.

The competition to be held online and offline, will have subvenues in nine countries, namely Tel Aviv in Israel, Eindhoven in the Netherlands, Sydney in Australia, Toronto in Canada, Berlin in Germany, Tokyo in Japan, Madrid in Spain, Silicon Valley in the U.S., and London in England.

Contestants will compete in seven emerging industries, namely new-generation electronic information, digital fashion, high-end equipment manufacturing, low carbon, new materials, biomedicine and health, and ocean economy.

For the first time, the organizer has introduced a reward mechanism to attract talents to compete in contests of artificial intelligence testing, technological development of power semiconductor materials, and R&D and application technologies of new absorption materials.

Since being initiated in 2016, the competition has attracted 6,182 overseas projects.

Among the contestants, 61 percent of the team leaders were foreign nationals and 58.3 percent of the contestants were doctorate holders.

Of the 350 projects that participated in the Shenzhen finals, 120 have reached cooperation agreements with the city’s industrial parks, among which 47 have settled down in the city.