China: Rewarding academic innovation to drive economic growth
China will give greater financial rewards to innovative academics and small research bodies in a drive to convert interesting scientific ideas into commercial realities and rev up its high-tech industries as wider economic growth stalls.
China’s State Council said research bodies and university units that transferred their work to outside firms to develop and market should receive no less than half the net income earned from the product as a reward.
China is trying to boost its high-tech industries, from medicines to computer chips, to offset a slowdown in manufacturing and exports that has dragged its economic growth to its slowest level in a quarter of a century.
“It is important to speed up the transfer of scientific achievements, open a channel between science and the economy and quickly create a new productive force,” the State Council said in February 2016.
Academics are to have greater freedom to do part-time work with external firms to develop products, the State Council said.
Wang Bin, deputy head of the China Association for Promotion of Private Sci-Tech Enterprises, told the Xinhua News Agency that researchers often worried about getting into commercial projects for fear of harming their academic careers.
“The new policies will encourage more to venture into business,” he said.
Reuters
