Zhou Luming, President of Shenzhen Yuanchuangli Offshore Innovation Center, served as Deputy Director of Shenzhen Science and Technology Bureau, Deputy Director of Shenzhen Tsinghua Research Institute, and Chairman of Shenzhen Association for Science and Technology. He presided over the formulation of a series of major scientific and technological innovation legislation and decision-making research work in Shenzhen, promoted the theoretical research and practice of private scientific research institutions, and established Shenzhen’s overseas collaborative innovation center in Boston and other places.
Three magic weapons for China to dominate digital innovation
I noticed that you have been paying attention and emphasizing the importance of digital technology, can you give some introduction to this here?
Zhou Luming: This round of digital technology innovation and digital economic development has given birth to major development opportunities in the next 10-20 years, and is a global trend. I am very optimistic about China’s future development in this area.
What we mean by digital technology is a set of interrelated technologies, including elements of artificial intelligence, big data, blockchain, Internet of Things, cloud computing, 5G, etc., which work around data collection, storage, processing, transmission, etc. , sharing, trading and other links.
This also means that the new round of technological innovation may no longer simply be carried out around a certain product, and the problems solved by the new technology are carried out in a much larger scenario, which may be the ecology of an industry and technology, A park is even a city of tens of millions.
It is based on these factors that we say that this round of technological innovation has interdisciplinary features in knowledge, cross-industry features in industrial form, and cross-departmental features in government regulation. Technological innovation is very different.
We say that traditional scientific and technological innovation advocates the transformation of achievements, and after the rise of digital technology, application-driven innovation has gradually become the mainstream. The advantages can be said to be quite significant.
Although there is still a big gap between our basic technology and the United States in terms of digital technology innovation, in terms of application-side innovation, we have many favorable conditions that they do not have. Even some Chinese friends who are AI companies told me that when they communicated with overseas counterparts, they often found that many foreign applications were lagging behind China.
Because the development and improvement of artificial intelligence technology is very dependent on the conditions on the application side, including data, scenarios, etc., and these things happen to China to have a huge advantage.
In the past 20 years, China has accumulated the largest number of digital citizens in the world through rapid digitalization, and has formed the world’s most abundant digital application scenarios and massive data resources through digital infrastructure and smart city construction. I regard this as China’s roost. Three magic weapons of digital innovation.
If our enterprises make full use of these three magic weapons, and then the government can solve the problem of cross-departmental management well, and can issue management norms for new digital economy formats as soon as possible, it will form a dual track of technological innovation and institutional innovation. drive.
Do you think China’s advantages in the application side can really hedge against the US’s advantages in the source?
Zhou Luming: The Sino-US technology war is a defensive war for China. It will kill us by choking our necks. We rely on scale to make our necks thicker, making it hard and hurting our bodies. As long as we don’t kill us, we will win. In this sense, if we fight for the source with the Americans, we are doomed to fall into a trap (just like the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union).
Therefore, insisting on the source innovation of application-side traction should become our basic strategy. The so-called completely independent and controllable, comprehensive layout of source innovation, and fundamentally solving the problem of stuck neck is an unrealistic idea.
We must admit a fact: the dominance of Americans in the technological innovation pyramid will not change for a long time in the future, which means that some neck-stuck phenomenon will exist for a long time, but the pressure of this pushback will be in our With some changes at the source, the pressure on the neck will gradually ease.
Another misunderstanding that needs to be clarified is: neck stuck itself is not a scientific problem. Although it is related to the source, it is essentially a technical problem and an application-side problem. The bottleneck technologies such as lithography machines, chips, databases, and industrial software that we mentioned are behind some well-known technology companies, rather than the results of each or several basic researches. Therefore, a headache doctor is more reliable than a headache doctor.
In the part of digital technology, the advantages of China’s application side have indeed begun to emerge. In October last year, a senior U.S. Air Force official in charge of artificial intelligence resigned. He said that the United States has completely lost to China in the AI game. In fact, what he said is that on the application side, our smart devices learn more scenarios and data than the United States, and the speed of evolution is faster.
A while ago, a business owner who was doing artificial intelligence gave me a point of view. He said that the current evolution of artificial intelligence is the intelligent evolution of a single intelligent product in the United States, and the systematic evolution in China. This system may be city-level or even The evolution of a greater level of intelligence. In fact, he is also talking about the scale of China’s application scenarios.
This view explains very well why Chinese digital technology companies have been able to grow at a faster pace than their Western competitors without fundamental changes in the chronic diseases of Chinese scientific research.
This is something that American elites are more worried about. Of course, it also verifies that the application-driven technological innovation model is the direction that must be adhered to.
Application-side innovation is inseparable from Internet platform companies
When it comes to digital economy and digital innovation, we have to mention Internet platform companies. What do you think of the role of such companies in digital innovation?
Zhou Luming: In the era of digital technology innovation, Internet platform companies are an indispensable part of a country’s core competitiveness. It is with the prosperity of the Internet industry that when the digital economy comes, China can occupy a place in the pattern of competition between the two powers because of the advantages of both hardware and software.
Powerful countries (including Europe and Japan) that relied solely on hardware innovation in the past are no longer qualified players in the digital technology era, and countries with a population of tens of millions are even more marginalized. Internet companies are the major achievements of our technological innovation over the past 40 years, and their important value must not be negated with partial generalization.
As for the impact of the Internet industry on the real economy, the monopoly problem of Internet platform companies is mainly because the government needs to improve supervision through legislation, and should not attribute all the responsibility to market players.
A basic principle of the market economy is that as long as an enterprise operates in compliance with the law, its commercial success is the greatest contribution to society. The moral kidnapping of Internet companies by some self-media is the background noise in the era of digital technology innovation. This kind of noise cannot be allowed to interfere with economic governance and affect the enthusiasm of enterprises for development.
In addition, there are many people who blame Internet companies for not developing very powerful technologies, which is even more nonsense, which is the greatest disrespect to the laws of market-oriented technological innovation. In market-oriented innovation, technology is a tool, and the market always chooses the right technology to achieve commercial success. If technology is stuck, there is an ecological problem. It is time to ask the government why the government has not planned and built the ecosystem. It should not be blamed. enterprise.
In this round of opportunities for digital technology innovation, the Greater Bay Area, especially Shenzhen, has obvious advantages in software and hardware. I hope that big Internet platform companies like Tencent can play an important role as organizers. Tencent should have the resources and the ability to do this.
Once Tencent can connect its original virtual scene with the current physical scene, it will eventually lead to the transformation of a large number of industries, and it is fully capable of playing the role of “topping the sky” and “standing on the ground”. “Dingtian” is to help R&D-based science and technology companies grow rapidly and solve future industrial and technological problems. “Lidi” is to help a large number of traditional enterprises to complete digital transformation and to assist them in cultivating talents in this field.
From this perspective, in this round of digital innovation, the role of Internet platform companies is very important, because they have the ability to connect hard and soft, that is, the ability to combine virtual and actual scenarios. It can be said that if our Internet platform companies can consciously develop in this direction, they will become an important strategic platform for national scientific and technological innovation in the future.
In the past period of time, there have been many negative comments by mainstream public opinion about Internet platform companies. For example, one of the more common views is that Chinese Internet companies are developed by copying other people’s talents, and there are very few original originals that belong to themselves. , what do you think?
Zhou Luming: It is unreasonable to say that our Internet platform was developed by copying other people’s stuff.
Because follow-up innovation has always been the mainstream of technological innovation in China in the past 40 years.
You know, until now, the only ones who can really stand on the pyramid and make original research results are those countries and those big companies.
China’s follow-up innovation can keep up, and after keeping up, it has achieved commercial success through economies of scale. This is actually a path advantage of our innovation and should not be blamed. After we have the strength, let’s talk about going to no-man’s land, right?
Of course, for several large and mature Internet platform companies, they have developed to this stage, and they already have considerable resources and capabilities, and they can fully play the role of organizers in no-man’s land.
I have been saying that the biggest advantage of China’s digital economy is the advantage of scenarios. How to organize these scenarios and present them in a systematic and large-scale manner is a big article, and Internet platform enterprises are fully qualified to come Complete this article.
I brought up the concept of a digital economic and social laboratory. I think companies like Tencent and Ali are the most suitable to play the role of the organizer of the digital social laboratory.
Because Tencent and Ali are well-positioned to talk about their original virtual scenes and connect with the physical scenes of social cities. Let these digital technology technology innovation companies put their products here for R&D testing, business model verification, and research and development of government regulations.
Moreover, once this is done, it will have a demonstration effect and can be replicated in every city.
In my opinion, this is a very reasonable entry point for platform Internet companies to participate in the role of digital economy innovation organizers, and this is also a role the government wants them to play. And it is conceivable that companies themselves are willing to do the so-called digital industrial ecology.
The role of government in digital technology innovation needs to change
I noticed that you often mentioned that the government should be the organizer in the process of digital technology innovation. This seems to have changed from your previous statement that the government should be a referee of the market economy. Why?
Zhou Luming: The innovation in the digital economy era has some new features, that is, the cross-disciplinary research and development activities, the cross-industry business operation, and thus the cross-departmental government management. There is a trend of strong correlation between new business forms and government management, and on the application side, the management rights and data ownership rights of a large number of urban application scenarios rest with the government. In the new era of technological innovation, the government has become an inescapable role, which is why I say that the government should be the organizer.
But there have been some worrying changes in the way the government has managed innovation in recent years that are taking a toll on the nation’s technological innovation.
This change is simply the in-depth involvement of audit, discipline inspection, and inspection (I will call these departments “disciplined forces” for the time being) in innovation management. The disciplined service maximizes the department’s goals and requires that all processes in the government’s innovative management must be coordinated with the disciplined service’s requirements for the use of funds and the behavior of civil servants.
The biggest contradiction in this is: first, the supervision method of the disciplined forces is a management process formed based on past experience, and the essence of innovation is change; second, the disciplined forces pursue absolute certainty (budget, path, decision-making), and innovation is a highly uncertain thing.
This regulatory approach is having a number of consequences:
The government’s science and technology and economic management departments are stuck in the decision-making mode of “safety production”, and the allocation of resources is inclined to institutions within the system and large enterprises, and the work of providing assistance (supporting start-up R&D companies) is becoming more and more difficult;
Because scientific and technological innovation is something that has to be done, and if you do too much, you will face the risk of auditing and inspection. The scientific and technological innovation work of some localities and departments is gradually becoming a formalism. The name is quite shocking. If you look closely, most of them are declarative and slogan expressions. There is no problem in your eyes and no logic in your heart. How can you innovate?
In addition, the decision-making cycle of technological innovation is obviously prolonged, and even anticlimactic. I have personally seen many projects in cooperation with the government that have ended in a long process. In the past, one case-by-case discussion was a powerful tool for local governments to solve scientific and technological innovation problems. Now, anyone who proposes a case-by-case discussion to government officials is a bit of a moneymaker.
In addition, supervision goes deep into the innovation process, rather than result-oriented, which leads to the lengthening and rigidity of the management chain, adding a lot of extra workload, making government funds a hot potato for many innovative institutions.
As the world’s second largest economy, the country’s economic governance is a highly complex large system. We must abide by the basic principles of system science: excessive pursuit of subsystem optimization will damage the overall interests of the system.
The science and technology war between China and the United States is a war that cannot be lost. Therefore, no matter from which point of view, technological innovation is a high priority goal of the national system. In order to achieve this goal, there is no reason why we should not improve the supervision method as soon as possible, and form a team with morale, ideals, responsibility and rationality. , A logical civil service to participate in innovation in the digital age?
(Interviewer: Ling Yun, Invited Researcher of Digital Innovation Research Institute)
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