Great Power, Strong Foundation, Innovation And Navigation

Editor's note

2021 is the first year of the 14th five year plan, which is the 100th anniversary of the founding of the CPC, and is also a key year for the strategy of strengthening the country and independent innovation.

The meeting of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee held on April 30 stressed that it is necessary to lead the optimization and upgrading of the industry, strengthen the national strategic scientific and technological strength, actively develop the industrial Internet, and accelerate the digitization of the industry.

The world is changing so much that it is hard to prevent China from rejuvenating. In such a period of great historical changes and opportunities, the 21st century economic report exclusively planned and launched a series of reports entitled "the road to greatness: Top 100 innovation power" throughout the year. Through screening and reporting the key enterprises and outstanding entrepreneurs in the national strategic industries, it has helped China's magnificent journey to climb new heights.

The series reports of the road to greatness: Top 100 innovation of big countries are launched in the form of pictures, videos and posters every month on the self owned platform and cooperation platform of 21 newspapers. Please pay attention.

The fourteenth five year plan for national economic and social development of the people's Republic of China and the outline of long-term goals for 2035 (hereinafter referred to as the "planning outline") promulgated on March 12 this year are rapidly integrating into reality.

On April 29, China's space station Tianhe core module was launched into orbit. The successful launch of Tianhe core module indicates that China's goal of becoming a major space power in 2030 will be closer. Aerospace Science and technology is the "basic and core field related to national security and overall development" in the "planning outline", and it is also one of the frontier fields that need to be accurately targeted in formulating and implementing strategic scientific plans and scientific projects.

In fact, in many fields, such as artificial intelligence, quantum information and integrated circuits, China is also making rapid progress. Behind this is the data support that China's R & D investment in 2020 will exceed 2.4 trillion, and the contribution rate of scientific and technological progress will exceed 60%.

Entering an innovative country is one of China's long-term goals in 2035.

"Innovation" is a high-frequency word in the planning outline, which appears 165 times in the full text. When talking about the outline of the plan, Yang Wei, academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and deputy general manager of aviation industry, once said that what excited him most was that innovation was placed in a very important position and was repeatedly emphasized.

In fact, the 14th Five Year Plan period is undoubtedly the key period for China to become an innovative country. With the continuous increase of R & D investment, China is expected to change from integrated innovation and follow-up innovation in the past to independent innovation, and even lead the world in some science and technology and advanced manufacturing fields and become the source of innovation.

The engine of innovation in big countries has been started. How will the giant ship sail?

Cutting edge

With the release of the planning outline, China's emphasis on scientific and technological innovation has risen to a new height, and the future development direction and planning are further clarified.

In terms of strengthening the original and leading scientific and technological research, the planning outline points out that a number of forward-looking and strategic major national science and technology projects will be implemented aiming at the frontier fields of artificial intelligence, quantum information, integrated circuits, life and health, brain science, biological breeding, aerospace science and technology, and deep earth and deep sea. This also means that these eight frontier areas will become the focus of China's future scientific and technological research.

It is not only the development direction, but also the development rhythm: artificial intelligence, quantum information, integrated circuit and other fields are important development directions during the "14th five year plan" period, and the cutting-edge technologies such as brain like intelligence, gene technology, future network, and deep-sea aerospace development are the key forward-looking planning industries.

According to Zhang Weixiong, managing partner of TMT in China of anyong University, it is necessary to prioritize innovation direction“ Technological innovation in cutting-edge areas certainly needs to be prioritized. It is impossible that the manpower, capital and resources invested in each field are equal and consistent. "

Among the key directions mentioned in the outline of the plan, some subdivision areas are worthy of attention. For example, as the core of the artificial intelligence industry, artificial intelligence chip can provide algorithm and computing power support for artificial intelligence, and deeply enable various application fields. According to tractica data, it is estimated that the global AI chip market size will reach US $72.6 billion by 2025, with a compound growth rate of 32.92% from 2020 to 2025.

At present, domestic manufacturers are also actively layout in this field, and the AI chip market is experiencing rapid development. According to the forecast of prospective industry research institute, the market scale of artificial intelligence chip in China will reach 78.5 billion yuan in 2024, with a compound growth rate of 45.11% from 2019 to 2024.

In addition, the current semiconductor advanced manufacturing process OEM is one of the main weak links in China, so the localization substitution of semiconductor OEM is also very important. According to the survey data of trendforce, TSMC's market share in the first half of 2020 is as high as 51.5%. The market share of SMIC international and Huahong semiconductor is 4.8% and 1.1% respectively in the first half of 2020. The relative proportion is relatively small and the overall market share lags behind. This is also the area in which China needs to continue to make efforts in the future.

Zhang Weixiong analyzed to the 21st century economic reporter that the priority order depends on the industrial foundation and the pace of commercialization, and also depends on the degree of universality of technology.

"For example, integrated circuit, artificial intelligence, quantum information, life science and other fields have strong professional conditions, and the current operation mode and application scenarios have expectations, and there are certain universal functions. For enterprises, they can also see benefits. These can increase investment in the near future," Zhang Weixiong pointed out In the fields of deep, deep and deep sea, our professional conditions are poor and our foundation is not solid enough. In terms of priority, we can consider backward and make steady deployment as a key forward-looking industry. "

Digital China

Accelerating digital development and building digital China is also the future direction of innovation in big countries.

"With the advent of 5g era, mass links, low latency, high bandwidth and other characteristics can solve the difficulties in remote transmission and big data processing. Digital communication will be gradually applied to intelligent transportation, intelligent energy, intelligent manufacturing, intelligent education and other fields." According to the analysis of China Galaxy Securities Research Institute, "big data center, Internet of things, artificial intelligence, virtual reality and augmented reality will be the key new digital industries in Digital China."

It should be noted that from the technical level, China's digital transformation has its own characteristics“ Through research, we found that some technologies in China are more valued than those abroad, such as 5g, blockchain and Internet of things. " Chen Yong, vice president of Gartner research, told 21st century economic reporter that China is the global "manufacturing factory", and the manufacturing industry is characterized by heavy assets, so it also has the basis and demand of the Internet of things.

In fact, with 5g driving new technologies such as blockchain, edge computing and artificial intelligence into the Internet of things, many parties predict that the market scale of China's Internet of things will grow rapidly. According to the prediction of China Electronic Information Industry Development Research Institute, the scale of China's Internet of things industry will reach 26.25 billion yuan in 2022, maintaining a growth rate of more than 20%.

However, Chen Yong believes that in terms of importance, technologies such as data analysis, artificial intelligence and cloud computing deserve more attention.

"We divide technology into three categories: traditional technology and mature digital technology, such as cloud computing, mobile and social media." Chen Yong said that the third category is emerging technologies, such as 5g, artificial intelligence, blockchain, etc., which have already received considerable attention. "Within these technologies, China still needs to strengthen its cloud computing field."

No matter at the level of policy or technology, the biggest opportunity for enterprises in the "14th five year plan" period is digital transformation. Chen Yong believes that in the process of turning to digital, enterprises can consider the transformation of "3 + 1", that is, "product, operation, customer + ecosystem".

Chen Yong pointed out that the advantages of enterprises in the process of competition are mainly reflected in the three levels of product leading, operation excellence and customer intimacy, and the direction of digital transformation is to give greater play to these three advantages through digital means. At the same time, Chen Yong stressed that the future digital competition is not a competition among individual enterprises, but between ecosystems. "Digitalization needs to be digitalized together with the ecosystem."

Specific to the IT construction of enterprises, Chen Yong believes that the focus of digital transformation is in management, technology, data and security, and enterprises should formulate work priorities according to their actual situation.

Innovation mechanism

Innovation in big countries cannot be separated from mechanism innovation. The outline of the plan emphasizes that we should further promote the reform of the science and technology system, improve the national science and technology governance system, optimize the national science and technology planning system and operation mechanism, and promote the integrated allocation of projects, bases, talents and funds in key fields.

"There is still a certain gap between China and the countries dominated by global scientific and technological innovation." Zhang Weixiong said frankly to the 21st century economic reporter.

This is related to the historical accumulation of science and technology innovation oriented countries. Taking Silicon Valley in the United States as an example, after the rapid rise in the middle of the 20th century, the current Silicon Valley has formed a series of innovation systems including industrial parks, venture capital, high-tech enterprises, educational institutions, etc.

"The United States is a" 3 + 1 "mode of scientific and technological innovation, which combines the government, enterprises and educational institutions with corresponding management mechanisms, thus forming a comprehensive innovation ecology of the combination of government and market." Zhang Weixiong pointed out.

In contrast, in the past, China's innovation is more reflected in the development of operation mode and business model, and the market plays a strong role in promoting it. However, the technology promotion in the frontier areas of the "14th five year plan" needs a lot of funds and resources, and even needs to build a talent system. At the same time, the return on investment is also more cyclical.

Therefore, in Zhang Weixiong's view, in addition to market drivers, the future innovation frontier technology also needs the joint efforts of the government and capital.

At the same time, the main development goal of China during the "14th five year plan" period is that the R & D investment of the whole society will increase by more than 7% annually. According to the data, during the 13th Five Year Plan period, China's R & D expenditure was 2.44 trillion yuan, and the R & D investment intensity increased from 2.06% to 2.4%, but there is still a long way to go compared with the 7% growth rate.

When it comes to the intensity of R & D investment in the whole society, Zhang Weixiong believes that from the perspective of the whole society, on the one hand, it is the intensity of investment, on the other hand, the effectiveness of investment is also worth considering“ Therefore, the whole set of governance system, including top-level design, priority ranking, innovation input and operation mechanism, needs to be considered comprehensively. "

Ji Xinsu, senior research director of Gartner, believes that to achieve effective innovation, we can consider the result incentive model“ In the process of government participation in innovation, it is inevitable to accept some losses, but in principle, it should not pay for the behavior of enterprises, but pay more for the results, that is, whether the enterprises have profitability and whether their businesses have cross industry value