R&D and Industry 4.0 to drive economic prosperity for Hong Kong
Although the Hong Kong SAR Government has invested more than HK$100 billion in I&T in the past few years, the industry only accounted for 1% of GDP in 2020, while financial services, trading and logistics accounted for 23 and 20% respectively. Across the border in Shenzhen, core digital economy industries made up more than 30% of the city’s GDP last year, driving its economic aggregate to over RMB 3 trillion. As the 14th Five-Year Plan strongly supports Hong Kong to develop as an international I&T centre, we should seize the opportunity and catch up. If Hong Kong is to increase the proportion of I&T industry in GDP to 20% within the next ten years, one expedient way is to encourage Chinese and overseas tech giants to move their headquarters to Hong Kong. This would help to create a favourable business environment for technology companies and start-ups, while also providing new employment opportunities for local and overseas talent. The U.S. city of Austin has provided a useful model. It cemented its status as a technology hub after convincing software giant Oracle to relocate its headquarters from California. The city is now home to secondary offices of many of the country’s largest tech companies, including Apple, Google, Amazon, Meta and SpaceX. A study from Our Hong Kong Foundation also cited the example of Shanghai and Boston which both introduced major enterprises and research institutes to create an environment conducive to the development of local start-ups and value-added industries.
One of the strategy is to increase our R&D investment to at least 1.5% of GDP. According to data collated (Figure 7) in 2018 by Nature magazine, Hong Kong is lagging way behind other Asian economies in research and development. Scholars have also been writing about this comparison (Wang, 2018) specifically addressing the need for government intervention and support to private industry to take lead to commercialising the intellectual property and research outcome. Wang (2018) specifically addressed the huge disparity between Hong Kong and Singapore in which more private enterprises are willing to apply for patents in Singapore.
This is part 1 of a report has been written by the contributing editor Daniel Chun for Smart City Consortium in their advisory report for Smart City Blueprint 3.0 – the original link to report Ch. 5 could be found here
Reference:
https://www.censtatd.gov.hk/en/web_table.html?id=220
https://www.censtatd.gov.hk/en/web_table.html?id=188
http://www.szzx.gov.cn/content/2022-04/12/content_25052370.htm
https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/06/how-austin-texas-has-evolved-into-a-city-of-unicorns-and-tech-giants/
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/11/oracle-is-moving-its-headquarters-from-silicon-valley-to-austintexas.html
https://ourhkfoundation.org.hk/sites/default/files/media/pdf/OHKF_Biotech_EN.pdf
https://media.nature.com/original/magazine-assets/d41586-018-05505-2/d41586-018-05505-2.pdf