Commercialization of sci-tech gathering pace

China recently released the annual report on the commercialization of scientific and technological achievements in 2020, showing continuous vibrant activities in the transformation of scientific and technological results.

The report indicates that 3,450 universities and academic institutes across the country signed 15,035 contracts in 2019, an increase of 32.3 percent compared with that in 2018, with a total trading volume of 15.24 billion yuan.

Despite the rise in the number of deals, the number of high-value contracts worth more than 100 million yuan dropped to 24 by 20 percent, the report said.

Han Jun, deputy chief evaluator of the National Center for Science and Technology Evaluation, said from 2016 to 2019, China saw a surge in the transformation of scientific results following the release of preferential policies.

However, scientific research takes time. The existing transformable results have run low and the output and transformation of subsequent results will also take time.

Commercialization of scientific achievements is an important part in China's newly formulated 14th Five-Year Plan, which proposes to strengthen the protection of intellectual property rights and to significantly improve the effectiveness of scientific results transformation.

National Center for Science & Technology Evaluation, together with Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China and a research council for China's science and technology achievement management, released the first report in 2019, aiming to grasp the progress of science commercialization and analyze the experiences and problems.

In three years after the State Council released the plan to promote science commercialization, such activity has undergone steady development as the 2020 report showed that individual researchers have received an increasing amount of cash and equity awards and the cooperation between industries and academia has also been improved.

The field of industry that received the largest amount of trading volume was manufacturing, accounting for 38.2 percent of the total contract amount, according to the report.

Chen Hongsheng, an official of the Department of Research Commercialization and Regional Innovation, Ministry of Science and Technology, which supervises the formulation, said at a news conference on Wednesday that science commercialization is a long-term task.

He said based on new requirements of the 14th Five-Year Plan, the ministry will strive to advance scientific self-reliance, enhance the ability to commercialize high-quality scientific results, improve commercialization services by establishing a high-level professional team and actively explore ways to promote science industrialization through financial ways such as angel investment, venture capital, intellectual property rights and technological insurance.