The 2025 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas provides evidence for the growth of Chinese technology companies, as 1,500-plus Chinese companies exhibited, representing nearly one-third of the total 4,500-plus companies present. Particularly notable was the strong showing from Shenzhen, home to 35% of Chinese companies at CES, accounting for 10% of all global companies at the show. The XbotPark/Shenzhen InnoX Academy alone had 40 companies presenting at CES, with products ranging from robotic lawn mowers, stringless smart guitars, automatic massage roller to AI powered character hub. The products come from the transformation of Shenzhen from being primarily a manufacturing hub to becoming a leader in innovation and high-tech product design. Shenzhen is one of the fast-growing cities in what China refers to as the Greater Bay Area, which includes Shenzhen, Hong Kong, Macao and eight other cities in Guangdong province. Together they are building an innovation ecosystem rivaling that of the US Silicon Valley’s. As Jensen Huang puts it, it is the only place in the world that integrates electromechanical and AI capabilities at the same place.
XbotPark And InnoX — The Chinese Y-Combinator
Over 80 universities and hundreds of startup incubators and training programs in the Greater Bay Area provide a pipeline of next generation leaders in entrepreneurship and high-tech product development. One example is XbotPark/InnoX, which provides systematic entrepreneurial studies and a support platform to aspiring youth, much like Y Combinator in the U.S., but supplemented with courses in design thinking, system engineering, combined with a big talent pool and team of mentors for product ideation, technology solutions, manufacturing and marketing. Together, they give budding entrepreneurs a seamless environment to convert ideas to an actual mass-manufactured product.
Li Zexiang’s Inspiration for Next Generation Innovators
InnoX and XbotPark were developed by Professor Li Zexiang, who grew up during the Cultural Revolution and afterwards became one of China’s top entrepreneurs. Li’s life story includes working in a school-run factory making electric insect traps while awaiting college admission. Li received a scholarship from the Alcoa company that enabled him to earn degrees in Electrical Engineering and Economics from Carnegie Mellon University, followed by master’s degrees in EECS and Math, and then a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and computer science from the University of California at Berkeley. Li then worked at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, taught at New York University’s Robotics and Manufacturing Laboratory, and returned to teach at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 1992.
After returning to China, Li co-founded and backed dozens of startups, valued at over $42 billion. Li’s companies include Googol Technology, founded in 1999 and now China’s largest motion controller company, ePropulsion, one of the world’s largest electric boat motor companies, founded in 2012, Hai Robotics, recently valued at $2 billion, and Narwal, a robotic sweeper and mop company, valued at $1.6 billion. The most famous of Li’s companies is DJI, which was started by Li Zexiang’s student at HKUST, Frank Wang. DJI is the world leader in consumer drones and now holds 75% of global market share with a valuation over $20 billion US.
Nurturing Chinese Creativity At InnoX And XbotPark
Building on his track record in starting companies, Li co-founded XbotPark in 2014. XbotPark has already incubated over 60 companies, with six achieving unicorn status, or a valuation over $1 billion. XbotPark also has developed its own Collaborative Manufacture platform that connects over 60 startup companies with a network of suppliers and manufacturing. In 2021, Li founded the Shenzhen InnoX Academy, a hub of engineering technology innovation which has attracted educators and startups from around the world. InnoX provides education, mentoring and resources for creative entrepreneurs in China as well as through bootcamps and joint master programs for global universities such as KAUST in Saudi Arabia and HKUST, and intensive workshops in STEM education for youth.
To get more information about these initiatives, I spoke with Carol Yu, who is a founding Partner and the Associate Dean of Shenzhen InnoX Academy. Yu described how Li started trying new methods for education based on his idea for making classes “more exciting for the students” with project-based learning and robot competitions. Yu explained that after the course redesign, Li noticed that students “work for 2,3 days without sleeping and his job becomes dragging them out of the lab to go to sleep.” “Our model is actually very different from all the universities,” says Yu, and designed “to let the students work on something they are passionate about.”
A New System For Cultivating Chinese Talent
Once Yu joined InnoX, her job was to “build up the system for talent cultivation.” The InnoX system begins with an application process where over 1300 people compete for roughly 80 spaces in a two-week camp every winter and summer. During the camp, Yu describes how “we watch them deeply from all different perspectives,” and for some participants, “teammates will leave them for maybe two or three times,” a sign that “this person has a problem working with others.” The mentors at this point give “very critical feedback and see how they react” to gauge “how reflective they are,” explains Yu. Further observations note how students learn and research further after setbacks, and top performers are selected to enter InnoX to develop their products.
The InnoX team helps them form into teams, define their products, develop the technology solution, make connections with factories and supply chains, develop marketing plans, and get access to venture capital investors. These new entrepreneurs also receive instruction and mentoring from prominent innovators. The results? Yu explains that “overall, almost 1700 people have come through our system, and we have built a talent pool of more than 7,000 professionals.” Yu noted that InnoX now includes 466 full-time entrepreneurs and 67 teams. 60% of the companies in the first batch of InnoX reach “angel” levels of valuation in 2 years, coming in as single individuals.
Shenzhen As A Chinese Silicon Valley
InnoX and XbotPark are optimized for Shenzhen’s unique colocation of R&D talent, manufacturing and supply chain base. Yu notes that in the old days, for US companies like Apple, “all the R&D is done in Silicon Valley, and then Foxconn does all the manufacturing in Shenzhen.” Yu believes that nowadays, instead companies need “the design, the research, and the manufacturing at the same place to make sure that your product iterates very fast and very cheap,” which Shenzhen offers.
InnoX is sharing its model with over a dozen universities across China, launching pilot projects and training teachers and professors around the world to teach STEM in new ways. Examples include Chongqing University, which has established a new undergraduate program of 60 people per year, with 21% of the undergraduates securing market funding at graduation, compared to 0.75% at MIT and 0.51% at Stanford; the new Division of Integrative Systems and Design at HKUST; and a new joint master’s degree program with KAUST in Saudi Arabia, all based on “hands-on” and “project-based” education. Yu explains that, “for math and physics, we’ll ask them to build an electric boat, and then their performance in the water will be their score.” More than any course content, the InnoX system works to fill in where China’s education system leaves off. As Yu explains, “the students are very good at solving problems, but not very good at finding problems. We want to start at a very messy beginning of helping them to find a good problem.” Judging from the successes of XbotPark/InnoX, their system not only helps Chinese entrepreneurs find problems but also to create solutions that can be manufactured and marketed to a global audience.