Although the traditional industries are facing the chill, it cannot stop the uptrend of international investment.

The 2016 (fourth) Innovation and Capital Forum under International Prospective was co-sponsored by the Zhongguancun Administrative Committee, Haidian District Government and Zhongguancun Development Group, hosted by ZVCA, and supported by Happy Entrepreneurship College and ZPark. More than a thousand of people had been assembled on the forum. On the site, the ambassador and counsellors from many nations including Canada, the United States, Israel, France, and Switzerland, send warm invitation to Chinese investors. ZVCA signed agreements with Canadian FOF, Qianhai Equity Investment FOF, and Shanghai Equity Exchange respectively. Israeli cross-border projects roadshow spread to parallel forums nationwide through live videoconference. Most well-known organizations of domestic equity industry and hundreds of public companies were well represented in the forum. Famous scholars, such as, Mr, Kang JIA, Mr. Chunsheng ZHOU gathered here and exchanging their ideologies. This forum made a great contribution for Zhongguancun to become a financial innovation hub worldwide.

The current ‘Entrepreneurship and Innovation’ policy motivates the passion of population, and drive the ‘incubators’ to become a special new industry appeared on the land of China. According to incomplete statistics, during 2015, more than 4,000 different types of incubators were found nationwide. Incubators become a "standard" for enterprise parks, and even the first choice for many real estate companies to switch their core business. However, few people seriously considered how to properly operate an incubator.

The vast majority of incubators lack a profitable business model. Many incubators cannot found any start up projects since established, and would be unable to do anything after used up the governmental subsidy. However this trend in the industry will inevitably cause problems. No wonder in the just-concluded annual meeting of ZVCA, this issue become one of the priorities and was discussed in-depth. Anonymity of a professional investment institutions, told reporters that "it is completely nonsense that people claim they are incubator without any projects and business models."

On this "2016 Innovation Capital Forum under International Prospective, representatives were invited from famous American accelerators:  9 Mile Labs, Plug and Play, and Schlatter Incubator, a famous Israeli incubator. Beside these three international incubators, four Chinese incubators join the discussion, which are a Beijing incubator (which belong to a fund of China Shipping Investment Co.ltd with the guidanceof Beijing government), InnoZ Incubator (which belong to Zhongguancun Development Group), and private background Thunder Buddies (Beijing) Technology Incubator and Sonke Incubator. The representatives from those incubators discussed in-depth on how to established incubator that adapt to Chinese condition. 

A selection of guests’ opinion is shown below:

Jiantao Pan, general manager of Changhong North America R & D Center:

We have to give more tolerance to incubators.  What is the failure rate of start-ups? At the beginning there is only a 10% success rate, then decrease.  If everyone follows the trend of start-ups, the rate could be lower and less than 10%. Then may be 95% of people will fail, those newly created companies will vanish overnight. This figure is probably not well known for people who operate incubators in China.

Wang Qi, COO of Israeli Schlatter's:

The foreign experience cannot be simply copy to China. The American experience cannot be copied; there should be a lot of localization. We need to absorb the essence of their advantage, but at the same time we need to exert the local advantage, the local features. This is very important.

Haobin Guo, CEO of Thunder Budddies:

 The development of Chinese incubator can be basically divided into three stages, the 1.0 version is commercial real estate or office rental, venue rental, which centralize offices and accomplish the incubator original form; the 2.0 version provides more services, including support of technology, road shows, FA business, a variety of human resources, tax registration, for example 3W coffee, (Start-up) Garage; we are now exploring the 3.0 version incubator, the main business models should be investment-based, especially seed round investment.

Zhiyong Li, Chairman of Great Sonke Community:

Sonke Start Up Community provides a business platform online and offline, with start up services, venture capital, start up office, to build a start up ecosystem. China has a very competitive environment, the number of start-ups increase, but the quality of start-ups declines. Under current situation, it is very important to build a platform and provide more policy service. In fact, in addition to acquire capital, it is more important to get the supervision by more experienced mentor, for entrepreneurs.

Chen Zhao, Head of Plug and play China: 

A successful incubator needs an incubation system. Plug and Play started cooperation with universities since 1998. We worked with team from Google and MIT, participate university competitions and discover personnel with innovative project. We now have business and investment in incubators and accelerator, located in Silicon Valley, Beijing, Shanghai, and we focus on discovering talents and projects from universities.

Dun Ni, general manager of the Zhongguancun InnoZ: 

For incubators, we believe that the key element is policies. We are talking about ecology, in fact, if you want to build an eco-system, you must have rules. Actually the attempt from Stanford University and Silicon Valley started from policies. So no matter if it is government policy, or policy provided by incubators to innovative start-ups, or some of the conditions from financial institutions, they all could be understood as policy, it is the core rules to build the ecosystem.

Sandy Sharma, Seattle 9 Mile Labs accelerator founding partner:

Who is going to buy the incubated business? From my experience, they are large companies. On one hand, the start up need to grow by themself, on the other hand, they can cooperate with large enterprises, and use the resources of large enterprises, of course, acquisition is also a exit way. Nowadays, the rate that innovative companies acquired by large enterprises is also increasing.