A few months ago, 26 people jumped into a plane and crossed half of the globe to embark on an amazing opportunity: China Tech & Culture Trip. ✈️🇨🇳 Over the course of 9 days and 2 cities, participants were able to explore tech companies, innovation and entrepreneurship and experience the culture.
But you may wonder, why China? There is a big Chinese community in our Alumni and they wanted to share how entrepreneurial and innovation ecosystem is in China. So with one goal in mind, to bridge the gap between Europe and China; the China Tech & Culture Trip was created. This was a shared effort from the EIT CSSA (Chinese Students and Scholars Association) and EIT Digital Alumni.
The experience started in Shanghai, where we had the opportunity to visit:
- 🚗 BYD and see some of their cars, including their newest addition: a dancing car.
- 🦾 Jaka, we learned more about how robots can be used in automation and saw how a coffee was made by robotic arms.
- 💻 Wicresend to see the digital transformation, AI transformation and their enterprise solutions.
There was also time to explore the city and learn about it thanks to our guided tours around the French concession, Nanjing Road, The Bund, Yu Garden and Tianzifang.
For the second part of the trip, we headed to Nanjing, location for Jiangning Economic and Technological Development Zone, a national-level model zone for outside world opening, foreign investment in high-tech industries and pioneering scientific and technological innovation. We had the opportunity to attend the following:
- 🌏 European-China Innovation & Tech Exchange event was held. A very good opportunity to learn more about the Jianing Development Zone, cross-border opportunities and strategic opportunities.
- Our CTO, Katariina Martikainen, introduced EIT Digital Alumni and its mission.
- 5 participants got to pitch their companies to pursue cross-border collaboration and attract the Chinese market:
- Anqiao, to help Chinese electronics enter Europe and for their buyers to prove cybersecurity standards focused on data privacy and cybersecurity by Christian Siman
- TaskifAI, an intelligence platform to help track beauty and fragrance companies by Mazen
- Voira, an AI voice agent platform that handles calls based on business outcomes by Gabriele Bonadiman
- Westlake Robotics, that creates humanoids robots and developed a real-time movement imitation algorithm by Zhijie He
- ONESKYholding SRL, a concept with an academy, a luxury hotel, convention center and restaurant in Piazza Armerina, Sicily by Frank
- Our CFO, Rafael Muñoz Gómez, joined the final panel discussion: How to Efficiently Build an Open and Collaborative China-Europe Innovation Ecosystem.
- 🦾 Estun to learn about industrial robotics and manufacturing, seeing humanoids and experiencing our second robot-made coffee.
- 🧑🎓 Collaboration fair with Southeast University where we competed in 7 teams, formed by us and university students, to create and pitch low altitude economy startups.
- 🕹️ TopGun where we learned more about drones and how they were used in different situations, and saw how a fertilizer drone works.
It is safe to say that it truly was an enriching opportunity to explore China's tech and innovation ecosystem, and being part of it for a small amount of time. Thank you to the organizers Yuan Wang, Vicky Kong and Zhijie He for creating an amazing event, the support from Shouting Zhang and Wenjun Zhao and to all the participants, you all made this trip an unforgettable experience.