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Innovation and Technology

The territory has 16 State Key Laboratories, renamed from Partner State Key Laboratories, and six Hong Kong branches of the Chinese National Engineering Research Centre, all recognised by the Ministry of Science and Technology. Starting from 2019-20, the government will double the maximum annual funding for each of these 22 facilities and for the Technology Transfer Office of each designated university2 to $10 million and $8 million respectively, to fully unleash. Hong Kong's strengths in scientific research and to foster technology transfer and the realisation of R&D results.

The Innovation and Technology Fund (ITF) supports projects that upgrade technology and promotes innovation in manufacturing and services. In 2018, the fund committed more than $1.8 billion to supporting over 2,270 projects undertaken by research institutions and the industry, over 370 of which were R&D projects with total funding exceeding $1 billion. Research funding also comes from the University Grants Committee and Research Grants Council, which provided $5.37 billion in 2017-18.

InnoHK Research Clusters

The government set aside $10 billion in 2018 to establish two world-class InnoHK research. clusters in the Science Park, namely Health@InnoHK, focusing on healthcare technologies, and AIR@InnoHK, on artificial intelligence and robotics technologies. The aim is to attract top-notch universities, research institutions and technology enterprises to set up research centres and laboratories at the two clusters and conduct collaborative R&D work. Non-profit-making research institutions will receive financial support. The target is for the research centres and laboratories to start operating progressively from the fourth quarter of 2019.

Start-ups

Hong Kong has one of the fastest-growing start-up ecosystems. The number of start-up companies increased 18 per cent year on year to 2,625 in 2018, according to an Invest Hong Kong survey.

The government's $2 billion Innovation and Technology Venture Fund encourages private venture capital funds to invest in local I&T start-ups. It signed the master agreement with six venture capital funds in 2018 and will co-invest with them on a government-to-venture-fund investment ratio of about 1:2.

Six local universities obtain government funding through the Technology Start-up Support Scheme for Universities to support their teams in starting technology businesses and commercialising their R&D results. From the scheme's inception in 2014 till end-2018, about $114 million had been provided for 188 start-ups. Starting from 2019-20, the annual maximum funding for each university will be doubled to $8 million.

2

With effect from 2019-20, the designated universities are the University of Hong Kong, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, City University of Hong Kong, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong Baptist University, the Education University of Hong Kong and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

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