Spin-off in China: why and how

Innovation in high technology is widely viewed as a key element in today´s economic development. When mentioning high-tech business, the large and important spin-offs from MIT in the Route 128 corridor and from Stanford and Berkeley in Silicon Valley are prominent examples of how significant roles that universities can play. In China, fostering innovative activities in traditional technologies is positioned as the one of the major tasks in its economic reform. Under such circumstance, high-tech companies, spin-offs mostly, have been regarded as an important means for transferring technology from academics to its long-ailing state-own enterprises (SOE). It is recently (within the last decade) that academia, universities and China Academy of Science (CAS), has actively and directly sought to create spin-offs, in the fields such as biotechnology, information and optical technology. The author has followed the path taken by some leading spin-offs, and presented research results in his previous papers. The aim of this paper is to offer a more strategic analysis of the dynamics underlying the creation and development of these high-tech spin-offs in China