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在线翻译:
szdaily -> Opinion -> 
SZ, a paradise for innovators
    2015-03-02  08:53    Shenzhen Daily

    Wu Guangqiang

    jw368@163.com

    WHAT pops into your mind when you hear names such as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs mentioned? For me, it’s that they both started their business empires by tinkering with something in a garage. In 1975, Jobs and his friend Steve Wozniak built a prototype computer in the garage of Jobs’ parents. In the same year, Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded Microsoft in a garage, with just a few resources.

    Many other big businesses were also born in garages, including Google, Amazon, Disney, and HP.

    In China, garages are not a birthplace for great companies, but most business giants also had humble beginnings. In 1999, Alibaba was founded in Jack Ma’s home — a 150-sqm apartment in Hangzhou, capital city of Zhejiang Province. Ma Huateng (Pony Ma), co-founder of Tencent, also started his business at home with four telephone lines and eight computers.

    Both the Chinese and English languages possess inspirational sayings to encourage youth to make their dreams come true by starting from scratch. There’s a Chinese saying that translates to: “A great many grains of sand grouped together form a pagoda.” An English equivalent goes: “Many a little makes a mickle.”

    The greatness of a modern nation can be measured by the number of great businesses created and developed by dreamers with nothing but ideas and bare hands at the beginning. By this criterion, the U.S. and China are among the greatest countries nowadays.

    In comparison with the U.S., however, China is still lagging far behind in terms of a start-up-friendly environment. Americans are still taking the lead in innovation and application of cutting-edge science and technology.

    The only chance for China to catch up with the frontrunner is to stimulate millions of young people to pursue their entrepreneurial dreams. The booming maker movement in China is a positive development.

    Premiere Li Keqiang’s visit on Jan. 5 to Shenzhen-based Chaihuo Maker Space, the first maker space in Shenzhen created and sponsored by Seeed Studio, demonstrated the Chinese Government’s commitment to embracing the trend of mass entrepreneurship and innovation in the Internet age. Shortly after the visit, the State Council pledged to take various steps to create an amicable environment for innovation and entrepreneurship in order to power growth and generate jobs.

    The fact that Shenzhen has been assigned as China’s first National Innovation-Oriented City and National Innovation Demonstration Zone highlights Shenzhen’s important place in the nation’s and the world’s innovation trend.

    Xu Qin, Shenzhen’s mayor, recently vowed to encourage youth entrepreneurship and innovation with better policies and services. One of the moves will be the city’s plan to host an International Makers’ Week in June. The city is also working on an adolescent phonological innovation scheme.

    To most people, makers and maker spaces still sound strange. Make magazine co-founder Dale Dougherty defines a maker as someone who builds, creates or hacks physical materials, whether food, clothing or gadgets. Makers often meet at hacker spaces, or maker spaces, to learn and work together. There are hundreds of maker spaces worldwide and over a dozen now in China, many of which are in Shenzhen.

    Seeed Studio, sponsor of Chaihuo Space, works with global makers to transform their hardware designs into prototypes and samples. It specializes in the small-scale manufacturing of experimental, niche-market products.

    

    Unlike old inventors who worked alone in garages, inventors today can use software to design objects to be produced by desktop machines like 3-D printers. They can get funded on Kickstarter. And thanks to the Internet, their work is collaborative. They freely share their ideas and designs online. Chris Anderson, former editor in chief of Wired, describes makers as “the Web generation creating physical things rather than just pixels on screens.”

    Some of Shenzhen’s inventors might develop the next groundbreaking technology, or at least their creative endeavors may mark China’s breakaway from the stigma of being product pirates. Shenzhen-based DJI-Innovations is one of the rising stars. Specialized in drones, the company’s products have taken 70 percent of the world’s unmanned plane market.

    Shenzhen’s massive manufacturing capability, perfect component supporting systems and efficient logistics network make it one of the world’s best centers for innovation.

    Hopefully, Shenzhen will see the birth of many homegrown innovative companies like Apple.

    (The author is an English tutor and a freelance writer.)

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