Sci-Tech Entrepreneurship Service Center: a dreamland for makers

Since it settled at Zhanjiang High-Tech Development Zone four years ago, the Scientific and Technological Entrepreneurship Service Center has received 42 startups and 19 student entrepreneurship teams with five of them successfully incubated.

The enterprises that are being incubated at the service center are mainly engaged in Internet Plus, e-commerce, Internet of Things (IoT) and data analysis. Collectively, they have been granted 45 intellectual properties and over 31 patents and trademarks, generating total revenue of almost 100 million yuan ($15 million).

Dai Xiaosong is among the first batch of makers who arrived at the center. After years' efforts, his teams have now launched multiple technological products, such as Aishang, a mobile payment app, which has already been used in local hospitals, on buses, in supermarkets and at Baosteel Zhanjiang.

Beyond that, the center has also witnessed the expansion of the Alibaba Location Based Service Center (Zhanjiang), formally known as Zhanjiang Quanchengtong Network Technology, since its settlement in 2015. As of December 2016, the company has served more than 110 local e-commerce companies and held 13 training sessions.

None of these achievements can be separated from the one-stop services provided by the service center. Apart from inviting tutors from Xinhua Maker School and LA E-commerce College to instruct the startups, the center set up coffee rooms, crowdfunding rooms and roadshow centers to provide places for communication and promotion.

As one of the first national incubators in western Guangdong, the center also provides a series of preferential policies granted by the High-Tech Development Zone. To date, the amount of the exempted rent has reached more than 1 million yuan.

New doors of opportunity are expected to swing open for the service center, as the state encourages technical staffs to leave public institutions and start their own business, and for more and more local talents return to their hometown to seek out entrepreneurship, said Lin Zhihui, director of the service center.