OpenChina-ICT Dialogue Conference in Beijing, November 2012

The Ministry of Science and Technology of China (MOST) and the European Commission together with some of the leading company and university partners from China and the European Union organised an international conference on ICT and digital services cooperation between China and Europe in Beijing, China, on 15-16 November 2012 (www.openchina-ict.eu). The event gathered about 300 international experts.

The China-Finland ICT Alliance (www.ictalliance.org) was invited to the event to present the “work in progress” and a potential model for creating and facilitating a new, open and dynamic approach for international R&D&I cooperation that can complement and boost existing cooperation instruments and frameworks between China and Europe. China-Finland ICT Alliance was also invited to moderate the concluding high-level panel on European-Chinese cooperation in ICT research. The Finnish side coordinator of the ICT Alliance is TIVIT, the Finnish Strategic Center for Science, Technology and Innovation in ICT, and the Chinese side coordinator is WiCO, the Shanghai Research Center for Wireless Communications.

The approach of the China-Finland ICT Alliance is based on open information sharing and joint interest discovery and thus enabling interested parties and contributors to join with minimum entry barriers and processing delays. It is becoming widely recognised that such a novel approach is a necessity for addressing urgent challenges in industry and society in a timely and globally scalable manner.

“We expect such an approach to speed up the innovation cycle both for the incremental improvements in today’s products and services and for providing immediate benefits to the parties involved. We believe that such an approach can also bring together elements that are required to create and quickly scale unforeseen and disruptive innovations. In the best case this may trigger the creation of new industries that leverage ICT and digital services”, say Matti Hämäläinen and Jani Kaarlejärvi of TIVIT.

The open approach allows moderating risks to companies, institutions and public stakeholders from being involved in cases that turn out not to become successes while allowing innovative teams and individuals to take challenges working together in international “cross-border” networks and working with teams combing a variety of expertise. The lightweight model, in practise, removes boundaries between different industrial “silos” and between different administrative domains and allows for early testing in adequately large-scale real-life environments in various cultures and geographies, resulting to solutions that are pre-tested and locally for complex systemic challenges.

“Implementing this approach and moving forward with institutional and governmental guidance and support from municipal and state levels, is expected to provide new opportunities for China-Finland R&D&I cooperation but even more importantly to help facilitating China-Europe cooperation – and beyond with international partners. The results so far have been encouraging. As we proceed, we welcome organisations and experts to join the dialogue and work in developing, studying and documenting new models for international R&D&I for repeatability and scaling”, conclude Matti Hämäläinen and Jani Kaarlejärvi.

For more information on joint China-Finland activities please see a recent report “New opportunities for China-Finland R&D&I cooperation” (Tekes report 295/2012, Jani Kaarlejärvi & Matti Hämäläinen (http://www.tekes.fi/u/china-finland.pdf).

The OpenChina-ICT programme is a key initiative funded by the European Commission 7th Framework with a view to develop a concrete EU-China ICT Cooperation Strategy to provide the necessary framework for strengthening European ICT research cooperation with China. As an important milestone of the project, the EU-China Dialogue Conference was dedicated to provide a forum of learning and networking event to promote EU-China ICT research activities and encourage participation and cooperation between China and European research communities.

The 2-day conference was composed of a plenary session followed by two subject tracks on the first day including a high-level dialogue meeting as a brainstorming session on how to promote ICT cooperation between both sides, a thematic track focusing on EU-China ICT cooperation research priorities. On the second day, a B2B session was arranged as an exclusive one-on-one occasion for European participants to exchange their project ideas and discuss cooperation in details with a group of pre-selected potential Chinese partners.

For more information on China-Finland ICT Alliance and TIVIT (www.tivit.fi), please contact

Dr. Matti Hämäläinen: matti.hamalainen@tivit.fi

Dr. Jani Kaarlejärvi: jani.kaarlejarvi@tivit.fi

Ms. Tina Junying Zhong: junying.zhong@aalto.fi