Zhong Zhihua:China's independent innovation

We always talk about that we have our innovative products and technologies, but the key question is whether we have competitiveness or not. We also need to focus on the angle when talking about self-innovation. We have personal angles, i.e. different professors and different entrepreneurs have different angles to innovate. Those who own the ability of innovation may be a team, a company, a research institute, an industry or a whole country. From this perspective of angle, what I am concerned is the self-innovative capacity of our country as a whole. So this concept is also very important. In a word, the innovation is related with capacity and angle. Only by standing on this height, we can feel the importance of integrating production, teaching and research.

The integration of production, teaching and research has been actually a national strategy. The report to the Seventeenth National Party Congress mentioned that “to create a new system of technological innovation of integrating production, teaching and research by taking enterprises as subject and market as orientation”. However, the question now is how to integrate the production, teaching and research?

It needs more discussion and clarification. Since it is presented as a national strategy, I think as the practitioner and the creator of the self-innovation, we must pay close attention to it and we must implement it. However, it’s not easy to integrate production, teaching and research and make it play a significant role in self-innovation. We must understand its essence and meaning. We usually think integration of production, teaching and research as combination of enterprises, universities and research institutes. Actually this understanding of self-innovation, I think, is far from being right. A simple combination of enterprise, university and research institutes does not guarantee the result of having meaning of integration of production, teaching and research. Why do we need to integrate production, teaching and research? From the perspective of practice of both domestic and abroad, the reason is that it is related with the self-innovation in terms of both capacity building and national angle. This is a very long-term issue not aiming at a specific technology or product. We need to do much basic research. For a major technological innovation, we need to try for many times before the industrialization is realized. This long-term process of technological innovation also needs integration of many disciplinary areas which determines that our universities, enterprises and research institutes can play a major a role in the process. I think one of formats of enterprises shall be advanced management, due inputs and integration with markets. This is the function the enterprises shall own. Scholars shall have forward-looking study in theory and applied basis research to prove a proposal. The research institutes shall do more to improve the pilot technological proposal.

However, the reality of our country now is that the basis research in theory in many universities is not very forward-looking. There are plenty of reasons for that. Partly it is the result of lacking enterprises’ guidance and related with the current management mechanism of science and research. Under the current evaluation system, many scholars write articles for articles and apply patents for patents. If the university does not have advanced theoretical research, it can not play a due role in the integration of production, teaching and research. On the other hand, I think the expectation of some enterprises on the universities is not appropriate. For example, some enterprises want the universities to help solve the problems arising in the short-term process of production. I think this is a job which universities shall not do. Certainly, some universities have its own specific orientation on this issue and did a lot of advanced research. Therefore they can provide technological support for the enterprises in a certain period in the areas like application of high-tensile steel, aluminium alloy die-casting and light weight technology, etc. I am aware of the situation too. However, some universities go to another extreme by establishing enterprises because they do not really understand the meaning of integration of production, teaching and research. The Ministry of Education has already taken note of this problem. The enterprises established by universities do not have the most advantageous status and become a problem of universities. What I talked above is all about the shortage of universities in the integration of production, teaching and research.

Actually the enterprises also have their own shortages too. I talked about this issue from the perspective of capacity building and national angle. It’s true that enterprises provide great support to the teaching and scientific research of universities. However, enterprises always expect too much of universities, which someway go beyond the universities’ responsibility scope. For instance, in terms of input-output, enterprises preferred to have less money to make big achievements in a very short time. Frankly speaking, most of them are not realistic. In addition, enterprises do not have enough evaluation and guidance of the relatively advanced technological research. This problem also influenced a great extent the amount of inputs by the universities on those technologies. I think this is a problem we need to overcome.