GUV's tech transfer regions feature arrives in the far east.

This month, Global University Venturing’s tech transfer report comes from the Far East. Since undergoing rapid industrialisation following World War II, the whole area has become a role model to emerging economies on how to catch up with the west. The Four Asian Tigers – Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore – have become beacons in how to rapidly develop economies. However, this report will focus on the biggest economies in the area, China and Japan.   China By Gregg Bayes-Brown In terms of technology transfer, China is a complicated and vast beast. On one hand, one pillar of the country’s incredible growth over the past few decades has been its insatiable appetite for foreign innovations. On the other, the rate at which China is securing patents is equally bewildering. In between, surrounded by a grey fog, is the subject of intellectual property (IP), and how both these inputs and outputs, and the questionable policing of global IP inside China, affects it. In terms of transferring technology into China, the practice began in the 1980s when then leader of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Den Xiaoping, began replicating programmes witnessed abroad. This included the practice of allowing foreign corporations access to China’s market in exchange for the technologies firms would bring in. In recent years, China has also been able to make a plea on moral grounds that foreign entities share technologies due to climate change, with the argument made by PRC leaders that China cannot be expected to meet carbon reduction targets without the technology to support the move to green. The need to secure such technologies has been further underscored by reports highlighting the high cost in reducing carbon emissions in China whilst meeting the country’s energy needs. A report from Tsinghua University in 2009 suggested the country would need to invest $293bn in renewable energy by 2020 for China’s emissions to peak by 2030, while the International Energy Agency suggested the figure will be closer to $400bn. Either way, the pressure is on PRC leaders to secure technologies as cheaply as possible, and the stakes couldn’t be higher in their ability to do so. China has overtaken the US as the world’s greatest polluter, annually emitting over double the EU’s own emissions in carbon dioxide, and shows little in the way of slowing its emissions growth. At its current rate and pace, Chinese contribution alone could be enough to tip the scales towards the negative…

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