Innovation spending boost by 2030 'aggressive target'

Secretary for Innovation, Technology and Industry Sun Dong said he hopes the government's goal of almost doubling spending on innovation in the coming five years will attract more funds to the city. According to Hong Kong's inaugural five-year blueprint, the SAR will strive to raise domestic expenditure on innovation activities to 3 percent of GDP by 2030 from 1.63 percent in 2024. The government also expects a 10 percent increase in average annual expenditure. "This is a relatively aggressive target," Sun told reporters. "We want to use this indicator to measure as well as to push for more investments on these innovation activities – not only from government side, but also mainly from the industry. "In Hong Kong, as we are pressing ahead with the new industrialisation development, we hope in the coming five years more investment from industry will go to the innovation activities, including now we also encourage many enterprises to establish R&D centres and so on." Sun said the target would cover not only expenditure on basic applied research commonly seen in universities, but also activities by enterprises such as product design, software development and pilot production. Edited by Edmond Fong