How Hong Kong is quietly contributing to China’s mighty tech rise – with a higher education push
- Hong Kong has been quietly pumping new blood into China’s start-up scene from its cluster of world-class higher education institutes
- Apart from its reputation as a global financial hub, Hong Kong has also become an unlikely incubator of tech talent, helping China make bridges with rest of the world
When robot enthusiast Andreas Widy decided to turn his underwater drone project from a lab in a Hong Kong university into a serious business, he waved goodbye to the city which he had called home for six years and headed north to China’s hi-tech hub Shenzhen.
“[In Hong Kong] shipments of materials [parts for the drones] could take one or two weeks … And if there’s a mistake, then you need to redo it and wait another two weeks for a new one,” Widy, co-founder and CEO of underwater drone start-up Navatics said in a recent interview in Shenzhen. “Moving the business to the mainland makes this [the supply chain] much faster.”
Starting a business was not the initial plan for Widy, a 26-year-old from Indonesia who received his undergraduate education from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). In his final year of study he was planning a career in academic research but a conversation with his mentor Li Zexiang, professor of engineering at HKUST and the chairman of drone unicorn DJI, led him down a different path.
Li encouraged Widy to start his own company.
“He said there was sort of a gap between research and actually bringing the work to society,” said Widy. “The effort that you put into a start-up will enable research to be used by people and can help society in different ways.”
Widy is among a crop of start-up founders who received their education in Hong Kong and later brought their businesses to mainland China’s technology industry. Some of the more well-known cases include the world’s biggest drone maker DJI, whose founder Wang Tao developed his first drones in the lab of HKUST as a student of Li.
