Sun Yat-sen University establishes study institute in Qianhai

The Sun Yat-sen University Hong Kong Institute for Advanced Study (Qianhai) was launched in Qianhai on May 26, marked by the signing of a strategic cooperation agreement between the Qianhai Authority and the Sun Yat-sen University (SYSU).

Guests attend the inauguration ceremony of the Sun Yat-sen University Hong Kong Institute for Advanced Study (Qianhai) on May 26. Photos courtesy of the Qianhai Authority

Through the partnership, both parties will leverage Qianhai’s industrial needs and the SYSU’s academic excellence to foster comprehensive and substantive collaboration in scientific and technological innovation.

The collaboration will focus on four areas: jointly building a university technology transfer center to help bridge the critical gap between research and commercialization, jointly establishing an overseas talent recruitment and development center, launching the Qianhai University Innovation Alliance to connect universities across the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area and create a cross-campus, cross-disciplinary collaborative innovation platform and jointly building laboratories, concept verification centers and pilot test bases to accelerate the transformation of innovations from the lab to production lines and into new quality productive forces.

At the signing ceremony, the first batch of key SYSU projects in fields including brain-computer interfaces, biomedicine, and artificial intelligence formally moved into the institute, marking its transition into substantive operations.

Qianhai will leverage its local service capacity and support capabilities to provide quality office space and full-process policy services for the platforms and projects entering the institute, helping drive research achievements toward rapid engineering, product development, and large-scale application, while fostering a number of high-growth enterprises.

Experts and scholars share insights in the commercialization of university scientific and technological achievements during a forum in Qianhai.

Following the ceremony, a forum was held where experts and scholars shared their insights into issues such as institutional reform, incentive mechanisms for talent, and precise resource matching, as they explored a replicable and scalable model for turning university research into practical outcomes.

The forum also sought to pool ideas and build consensus on how Qianhai can further improve its innovation ecosystem and raise the efficiency of technology transfer.

In recent years, Qianhai has increasingly become a hub for university technology transfer platforms. Initiatives such as the Hong Kong University Young Techno-Entrepreneur Academy, the Chinese University of Hong Kong InnoHub for New Quality Industries, and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University Qianhai Disruptive Technology and Innovation Research Center have all been established in Qianhai, forming a cluster of innovation platforms from Hong Kong universities and incubating more than 110 high-quality talent projects.

Building on this foundation, Qianhai has also created a cross-border innovation ecosystem that links “basic research in Hong Kong, technology transfer in Qianhai, manufacturing in the Greater Bay Area, and joint global expansion by Shenzhen and Hong Kong.”