Cutting Edge Capital: Beijing Ranked World’s Fourth Most Innovative City

Beijing is a tech Mecca, at least according to a recent study that ranked the Chinese capital ahead of other IT hotspots like London and New York. Conducted by real estate consultant JLL, the Innovation Geographies report attributed Beijing’s success to its “deep-rooted innovation ecosystem,” adding: “It has nurtured the most unicorns outside of Silicon Valley and is the third largest destination for venture capital funding.”

Unsurprisingly, San Francisco, which is home to the renowned tech hub Silicon Valley, topped the list of 20 innovation-focused locales. The top five was rounded out by Tokyo, Singapore, Beijing, and London. New York, meanwhile, came in eighth, ahead of other Chinese hubs like Shanghai and Shenzhen, which respectively came in 11th and 15th.

Read: Study Says Beijing Trumps Silicon Valley as the World's Top Tech Hub, But Those on the Ground Unsure

Although the uninitiated may have assumed New York and other cities would have done better, Beijing’s high ranking shouldn’t come as any surprise to the tech inclined. In fact, our fair city has been dubbed the "new Silicon Valley" on more than one occasion in recent years, thanks in no small part to the RMB 503.56 billion the Chinese capital's tech headquarters Zhongguancun Science Park (pictured above) saw in overall revenue in 2016, according to China Daily.

Andy Mok, a longtime investor in Beijing startups and frequent tech and business news commentator on CGTN, agrees with the survey’s findings. He calls Beijing "a magnet for the best and the brightest, the pace is faster and people are hungrier.”

A prime example of such voraciously ambitious firms is Kaiterra, whose Beijing-based founders cracked Forbes 30 under 30 list with their affordable, easy to use Laser Egg air quality monitors. Co-founder Jessica Lam says the Chinese capital was the perfect city to launch such a venture. “Before moving here I didn’t think twice about Beijing being a startup hub, but since moving here the energy is contagious. What I mean by this is that people are excited to try new ideas and are not afraid to make it happen.”

Read: Laser Egg's Creators Make Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia List

Aside from such eager players, Helena Javitte, open innovation manager at a consulting firm called Accuracy, also attributes that success to “support of the government, and powerful universities. Like, whatever China wants, China gets.” And that full-fledged tech sector support from government officials has yielded world-class results, in her view. As she puts it: “It takes four years for a Chinese startup to become a unicorn. It takes double that time in Silicon Valley.”

That being said, she is keen to learn more about how the order of JLL's top 20 list was derived. “It'd be interesting to see the criteria of the rankings. Beijing being ranked as high as number four isn't so surprising. But how did they arrive at that? Was it the number of startups? The level of venture capital investments? The number of unicorns?"

"I am also surprised by Tokyo and Singapore in this report," she adds. "That's why learning more about the criteria would be interesting, I think.”

Regardless, the report’s high ranking of the Chinese capital is yet another example of not only the government’s supportive policies but also the gumption of its talent. At least that’s the conclusion reached by Thomas Graziani, co-founder of WalktheChat.

He says: “I think the case of Hong Kong trying to become innovative through ‘innovation-driving’ policies, and failing, is a great example of the fact that innovation is a bottom-up process, not a top-down one.”

“It is the fruit of a lot of factors which are hard to control," he says, citing the presence of important government stakeholders in the city, leading universities and research, and an existing footprint of industrial and tech headquarters as prime examples. For him, such a “combination leads to a virtuous circle of technological innovation” for Beijing.

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Photo: China Daily