Wuxi innovation competition kicks off Shanghai session

Ti Gong

The 2022 China Taihu International Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition kicked off its Shanghai session on Thursday.

The event is the fourth of its kind organized by the government of Wuxi in neighboring Jiangsu Province as a platform to promote innovation and entrepreneurship and to attract promising startups to settle down in the city.

In the past three years, a total of 220 programs in the competition have landed in Wuxi via the platform.

This year, 1,217 teams registered in the Shanghai session with programs in areas ranging from biomedicine and advanced manufacturing to new materials and new information technology.

More than 44.5 percent of the participants are students or graduates of masters' programs and 31.9 percent are doctoral students or have doctorates.

Some of the teams are from famous institutions, such as Tsinghua and Peking universities.

Thirty-six teams, including eight from Shanghai, won out in the Shanghai session and will compete in the second-round selection later.

Eight programs covering the Internet of Things, new materials and biomedicine signed agreements with the Wuxi government to set up businesses in the city.

They include a project that has developed new graphene materials to extend the life of drinking water filters from six months to three years and make them recyclable.

Shu Youju, leader of the team, said they decided to settle in Wuxi because they can cooperate with the Jiangnan University there in further research and industrialization of their products.

And also, they found there were complete upstream and downstream industrial chains in the Wuxi National Hi-tech District.

More than 5,700 teams from all over the country have registered for this year's competition.

A total of 30 will be selected out in second-round sessions in cities including Xi'an, Lanzhou, Changsha, Shenyang, Chongqing, Nanjing and Wuhan to win tickets into the final.

The winners will get up to 10 million yuan (US$1.5 million).