Reuters: Chinese firms pour money into U.S. R&D in shift to innovation, by Jason Lange
This post originally appeared in Reuters on June 21, 2015.
Surging investment by Chinese companies in U.S. research labs is yielding a fast-growing trove of patents, part of a push to mine America for ideas to help China shift from being the world’s factory floor to a driver of innovation.
Largely absent from American research hubs a decade ago, Chinese firms including Huawei Technologies and ZTE Corp are now using U.S. researchers to create patents ranging from new software to internet infrastructure, according to an analysis of Thomson Reuters’ global intellectual property database.
The rapid growth in China’s U.S. investments will be a key topic at economic and security talks on Tuesday and Wednesday between top U.S. and Chinese officials in Washington.
They are negotiating a bilateral investment treaty that could deepen ties between the world’s two largest economies even amid tensions over China’s military assertiveness.
Even without a treaty, China is pouring capital into U.S. research as well as buying other assets. While its firms are still newcomers to investing in America and few work on the technological frontier, the Thomson Reuters data offers a glimpse of the advanced economy China aspires to build.
Patented inventions by Chinese firms that involved at least one U.S. researcher roughly doubled worldwide in each of the last three years, reaching 910 in 2014.