On May 27, a China Software Park Development Forum, a special topic forum of the 20th China International Software Expo, was held in Beijing Zhongguancun Software Park (Zpark) to share experiences and visions of software parks.

The Forum, themed “inventing the new reality by integration and innovation”, was hosted by the Ministry of Industry and Information (MII) and sponsored by the China Software Industry Association and the China Software Park Development Alliance. It was co-organized by Zpark.

More than 300 officials, scholars, software park leaders, officers of well-known enterprises and start-up representatives came together to share their ideas about development of increasingly open and competitive parks fueling a government-park-enterprise-research institution collaborative software industry platform. Innovation and entrepreneurship matters such as integration of informatization and industrialization, smart city, Internet+ and the development trend of software parks were covered.

Xie Shaofeng, director of the Informatization and Software Services Division of MII, expressed his hope that Chinese software parks would become clusters for new tech, new industry, new methods and new applications and be intermediary agents facilitating capital flow between parks and enterprises supporting innovation and synergetic development.

According to remarks made in 2015 by Jiang Guangzhi, member of the Beijing Municipal Commission of Economy and Informatization, Beijing’s software industry that year generated 623.1 billion yuan in output value, with an added value of 237.2 billion yuan. Software will be a pioneering industry in China’s digitization, informatizaiton and intelligentization, and software parks are expected to be the driving engine of that industry especially in regional development, said Jiang.

China is witnessing a boom in software and information services; software parks had become hubs for over 76.2% of relevant companies by 2015: their importance is becoming increasingly obvious.