Building blocks of China’s path to technological prowess and innovation-led development

Along just a few decades, China has undergone huge economic changes, managing an impressive catching-up drive. But although its past accomplishments are undeniably outstanding in terms of extensive development, the country has also accumulated multiple distortions and structural imbalances and it has now inevitably reached a crossroads, when a major qualitative switch is needed. Among other complex, simultaneous transitions, to further develop and reach “the Chinese dream†, Chinese economy must also transit from cheaply processing /assembling foreign-designed goods, using foreign-designed technologies and supplying foreign markets, to producing high quality, services-and-knowledge-intensive goods engineered in China, using locally-devised technologies and meeting, primarily, domestic demand. The paper looks at the efforts made and progress attained in recent years in terms of research and innovation development, sketching the Chinese academic and industrial R&D&I landscape and goals, identifying some of the most significant shifts and trends paving the way to an innovation-driven economy, as well as some of the roadblocks and challenges along this way.