06-Jun-23 12:00

Albert Wong, CEO, Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation

On Friday, HKSTP - that's the Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation revealed a plan to empower Malaysian businesses and talents with global growth ambitions to unlock the huge HK-Greater Bay Area (GBA)-China market opportunity.

They launched the “Innovation Mixer” – an outreach programme aimed at collaborating with enterprises and talents from all around the world to expand the innovation and technology (I&T) ecosystems in the region. They also unveiled the Market Discovery Programme, designed for global tech ventures expanding their reach into the China and broader Asian markets, through Hong Kong.

Needless to say this caught our attention and we wanted to learn more about what these 2 initiatives could look like and they're potential impact, so we got in touch with Albert Wong, CEO of HKSTP, to help break this down for us and explore the potential benefit to Malaysian businesses.

In case you're not familiar with HKSTP, here's a bit of background:

HKSTP has been around since 2001, so 22 years, and has strived to build up Hong Kong as an international innovation and technology hub. Some of the ways they've tried to do this include attracting and nurturing talent, while helping accelerate innovation and commercialise technology for entrepreneurs, to not just to grow in Hong Kong and the Greater Bay Area, but also Asia and beyond.

A quick look at some numbers show some pretty impressive achievements. They have established an ecosystem that has supported 14 unicorns, along with R&D hubs with over 13,000 research professionals and over 1,400 technology companies focused on healthtech, AI and robotics, fintech and smart city technologies.