NINGBO Exciton Technology Co Ltd is one of the beneficiaries of Ningbo’s talent recruitment project “3315 Plan.”

“In addition to financial support, Ningbo government has helped us by providing land to build two factories, one in Jiangbei District and the other in Xiangshan County,” said Flory Ren, research and development engineer of Ningbo Exciton Technology Co Ltd.

With such support, the company managed to break the monopoly of foreign technology by developing its own quality optical film for Chinese companies to apply it in the production of screens without having to import films from foreign countries.

Zhang Yan, the founder of Ningbo Exciton, is well-recognized as a great contributor to Ningbo’s economy and was rewarded as one of the 10 outstanding Ningbo professionals with an 800,000 yuan (US$121,514) bonus during 2017 Ningbo Talents, Science and Technology Week held last month.

The week long activity is held annually in Ningbo and this year marked the 12th edition of the event in an effort to attract and retain professionals.

Over 8,000 people signed employment agreements, with 872 companies attending the recruitment fair held during the event. Contracts were signed for 46 projects during the week with an investment totalling 21.5 billion yuan, including the cooperation in technology and platform establishment.

The ceremony to fund 10 new projects for this year’s “3315 Plan” was held during the week.

The 10 projects were in various sectors such as: automobile, smart manufacturing, health industry and new materials, of which the best project received a fund of 10 million yuan.

The city launched “3315 Plan” in 2011, intending to recruit 30 professionals into the national “Thousand Talents Plan,” (a recruitment program initiated by China since 2008), 300 selected into provincial “Thousand Talents Plan,” 1,000 globally influential professionals and 5,000 top-notch foreign professionals within 10 years. Both resources and financial support will be provided to attract them either to start up business or to be employed in Ningbo.

“Basically, the main targets of ‘3315 plan’ have been fulfilled till now and this policy is indeed powerful as Ningbo has two companies that were founded by professionals enrolled in the national ‘Thousand Talents Plan’ and listed in the A-share market while the whole country has only 13 companies of this kind,” said Zhong Guanhua, director of the Organization Department of the Communist Party of China Ningbo Committee.

Zhong announced that Ningbo will continue attracting talents by two new preferential policies as the extension of “3315 Plan.” One will give at most 5 million yuan support to outstanding professionals specializing in fields, including: shipping and logistics, finance, insurance, e-commerce, modern agriculture and technology service.

The other will fund start-up projects which have already received private capital investment and the maximum fund will reach 20 million yuan. For professionals or projects that are especially outstanding, there will be no ceiling of financial support.

Outstanding foreign engineers are also largely wanted in Ningbo and the government is encouraging local companies to hire foreign engineers by providing salary subsidiary.

Companies that employ one foreign engineer for over one year can receive up to 600,000 yuan as subsidiary from the government.

The government will also pay for the transportation and accommodation fees for local companies to invite foreign experts to share their knowledge and experience in Ningbo.

The foreign-engineer-attracting policy was launched in 2009 and the city has invested 370 million yuan in attracting a total of 1,486 foreign engineers.

As the first city to pilot the “Made in China 2025” project, Ningbo is dedicated to attracting professionals from home and abroad to develop “smart economy” both in smart manufacture as well as smart product design.

An industry upgrading is undergoing in Cixi, north Ningbo, as well as the hub of the city’s manufacturing industry, in which automatic production is promoted in factories featuring robots replacing labor force and big data facilitating production management.

“Manufacturing is truly the core of Cixi’s development as we now have 30,000 industrial enterprises creating an annual output value of over 230 billion yuan and 40 kinds of products’ outputs are leading in China,” said the Cixi City mayor, Xiang Min, at the 2017 China Smart Manufacture Forum.

Xiang said Cixi will promote smart manufacture in over 1,000 enterprises and foster 10 leading companies as the model of smart economy.

When Cixi is trying to attract professionals of smart manufacture with advanced technology, Zhenhai District in Ningbo is attracting outstanding projects with creative designs by helping them to be linked with both capital and marketing resources.

The district annually held the Qisi Yongdong (Brilliant Ideas in Ningbo) Maker Competition in order to attract creative projects.

Over 1,020 programs from 43 cities from home and abroad competed in this year’s competition and the ceremony to award 16 outstanding projects was held during the Talents, Science and Tech Week, where the submarine camera, called FiFish, won the gold award.

The awarded projects have the chance to receive investment and marketing help from local government and influential platforms registered in Zhenhai.

Ningbo National University Science and Technology Park, the organizer of the competition as well as an incubator located in Zhenhai, has attracted over 1,000 companies, among which most are cultural and creative enterprises.

“Ningbo has a good foundation of manufacturing to realize creative designs and also the people here have strong consumptive power. We believe the city will attract more makers to develop their business here,” said Lei Haibo, the founder of Taihuoniao, a company providing an open platform for industrial designers and customers to meet and trade.

Lei announced that the company will open a self-service intelligent hardware store this year in the park for people to experience and buy smart products, which is the company’s third store following the other two respectively in Beijing and Shenzhen.

“Creative products should focus on solving problems in people’s daily life instead of inventing something impractical,” Selina Shen, who is in charge of crowd funding project in JD.com, aired her opinions on a round-table meeting held on the 2017 Maker Competition.