Hong Kong always thrived with its vibrant & matriculated city structure, now the same with their startup ecosystem.
Cyberport hosts the largest number of fin-tech startups in the region fostering the ‘smart’ aspect in the city. Together with the corporate systems, it holds a vast potential for acceleration with its unique strengths in the field. Although still a couple footsteps behind being self-sustainable, its supported well and richly by the government to be steady in its pace.
My clustered vision of HKG’s smart city blueprint were made clear by Hon Mrs Regina IP Lau, who spoke at its international urban planning panel. She spoke of the city’s innovation being its centre point of future prosperity & being free of most barriers that slams down innovation from young entrepreneurs as seen in some other world cities.
HKG aims to consume fewer resources and be more environmentally friendly while maintaining its vibrancy, efficiency and liveability enabling business to capitalise on renowned business-friendly environment to enhance innovation and steadily transform the city into a living lab and test bed for development.
A system I was quite happy to come to know about were the universities in the city that strongly support their senior students to engage in building startups and joining social enterprises. Having a startup project and submitting as a final year thesis? Cool!
Food, let’s talk about it. I miss the amazing egg waffles for breakfast. Fish balls (fish meat turned into bite sized balls) and tendon soup for lunch. Shrimp chilly crumbles and egg pear pastries for dinner. Yum. There’s at least a dozen menu of items I didn’t have the time to try, pity.
China:
Crossing the HKG border into Shenzhen was quite the trip.
Foshan and Guangzhou have a good number of early stage startups. “Going Global” is an essential move for Guangzhou to develop into an international hub city, these cities have been gaining a lot of inspirations from other major countries to develop and grow their innovations and developments in the startup world but they lack local support and constant motivation to keep moving. Personally, I think the lack of interested investors and the small community of investors as a whole has a negative impact. Some still think traditionally? Maybe.
The cities’ local infrastructure and the old towns were very comforting. Beautiful tiny houses, large temples, long lines of fresh produce, and bruce lee’s community; completed my local heritage craving!
We are in a world where we foster startups to rise as the primary gear for economy, social growth and job creation while unfortunately witnessing some top corporations continue to cut down on their workforce; whereas the startups community grow stronger and more future-ready.
A short blog for one quick trip. Hoping to stay longer at HKG next summer and write a bigger one.
