TWENTY-SIX years ago, when Shanghai first invited foreign corporate heavyweights to sit down with local business and political leaders to discuss the city’s growth opportunities
and challenges, the overture was considered innovative and visionary.

Those attributes remain at the core of Shanghai’s transformation into a major world city.

When the first forum was held, China was still deliberating about how best to open its doors wider to the world. Then-mayor Zhu Rongji, who went on to become China’s premier, set up the annual meeting as a way to tap the expertise of some of the world’s smartest business people.

The meeting of the International Business Leaders’ Advisory for the Mayor of Shanghai is still held every year. If anything, it has grown in stature to become an international think-tank comprising more than 50 members from 16 nations.

The 2015 forum will be held today. Its theme is “Accelerating Shanghai’s development into a center of innovation in science and technology with global influence.”

“Real innovation is not something that will disappear soon after its birth, or something that is done five minutes earlier than others do it,” Edmund Phelps, the 2006 Nobel laureate in economics and a professor at Columbia University, told the Pujiang Innovation Forum in Shanghai on October 27. “Real innovation is something that has lasting charm and value … something that can transform people’s lives.”

The annual mayor’s forums have taken a long, hard look at core issues of the city’s development and transformation. They focus on such topics as the creation of the China (Shanghai) Pilot Free Trade Zone, industrial restructuring, the promotion of environmentally
friendly growth policies and measures to bolster a more open market system in the city.

In the past quarter century, Shanghai has grown into a global economic powerhouse and a coveted China foothold for the operations of multinational companies.

Today, as the city pursues its ambition to become a center of technology and innovation, Shanghai Mayor Yang Xiong and others in government are as keen as ever to hear assessments and advice from the brains behind the world’s most successful big companies.

Zhu Zhiyuan, chief of the Shanghai Branch of the Chinese Academy of Sciences
and a monitor of policies related to innovation, said he is interested in hearing how multinational companies integrate cutting-edge technology into their businesses and how they recruit and retain top scientists and engineers.

Of course, Shanghai is no stranger to knowledge-based innovation. It is home to many world-class scientific research laboratories, such as the Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation Facility
that studies and produces bright X-ray beams with advanced accelerators,
boosters and storage rings.
 

The city also has the Shanghai Supercomputer Center and the National Center for Protein Science Shanghai, leading research in areas that include life sciences, information technology and automotive engineering.

Shanghai also boasts elite universities like Fudan, Shanghai Jiao Tong and Tongji, all with strengths in different disciplines. Close to these educational facilities and inside almost every district of the city, innovation centers and startup incubators have been set up to nurture creativity.

More than 600 professionals recruited under China’s “One Thousand Experts Plan” are living and working in Shanghai. The city has more than 209,000 researchers and developers, an equivalent to the numbers in all of Italy or Canada.

Last year, Shanghai invested 83.1 billion yuan (US$13.3 billion) in research and development, almost double the amount allocated in 2010.

In May, Shanghai rolled out a series of initiatives giving easier market access to technology firms, more start-up funds for promising new ideas and improved income distribution for inventors working in state-owned entities.

Gu Jun, vice chairman of the Shanghai Commission of Commerce, said Shanghai has indeed entered a new growth era driven by technology and innovation.

“Multinational companies have played a key role in bolstering Shanghai’s capability and capacity in innovation,” Gu said. “Shanghai is fortunate to have them.”

The city is home to the largest cluster of foreign companies operating in China.

At the end of September, 525 multinational companies had regional headquarters and 391 research and development centers in the city.

New incentives

To keep that trend rolling forward, the local Commerce Commission recently released a set of new incentives to deregulate contract applications, tax payments and customs clearance for research equipment, to provide wider credit channels and to facilitate visa and residency services for foreign scientists and engineers.

The new measures take effect this month. In appreciation of foreign contributions,
Shanghai last month held an awards ceremony honoring multinational companies.

Forty companies won awards, all chosen from a competition jointly organized by Shanghai Daily and online news provider Eastday.com, under the auspices of Shanghai Information Office and Shanghai Commission of Commerce.

The judges included some of China’s top scientists and scholars, along with 5.7 million online voters.

Among the winners was Siemens Healthcare, which helped build China’s first proton and heavy ion hospital in partnership with the local government. Other honorees included GE China’s aviation engineering team, which was involved in building China’s jumbo jets, and drug firm Boehringer-Ingelheim, which set up China’s first world-standard biopharmaceutical center.

The awards also covered innovation in management, with Stora Enso taking honors for providing solutions for intelligent packaging to improve supply chains. Roche Diagnostics won an award for a nucleic acid test that ensures safety during blood transfusions.

“It is an innovation in itself to gather together so many multinational companies from so many different sectors,”Vincent Lo, chairman of Shui On Land, told the awards ceremony.

Of course, the mayor’s advisory forum has provided a guiding light to such endeavors. But there’s still more work to be done.

So today, about 500 foreign and Chinese delegates will gather for the annual forum.

The guest list also includes consuls-general, senior government officials, heads of major state-owned companies and top private businessmen.