Eighteen years after the first ground-breaking Forum on China Africa Cooperation (FOCAC, 2000), launched to officialise and institutionalize China’s relations with Africa, Beijing hosted – on 2-4 September 2018 - 50+ African heads of state/government and international actors during the 7th event of the series. Throughout these past 18 years, the global status and role of China and individual African countries changed dramatically.
FOCAC 2018 ended with little surprises for China-Africa cooperation in the realm of new technologies and innovation. This does not mean that China’s commitment in this area has decreased or become less relevant. Quite the opposite. Since the third FOCAC, in 2006, which represented a watershed moment in expanding partnerships to new sectors, with Information and Communication Technology (ICT) representing one of the most significant, cooperation in tech has become one of the new pillars of China-Africa cooperation.
La città di Shenzhen ha un tasso di spesa in Ricerca e sviluppo paragonabile a quelli dei maggiori centri mondiali dell’innovazione, come Israele e Corea del Sud. Dopo aver promosso politiche rivolte ad attirare le maggiori aziende e i migliori talenti internazionali in Cina, negli ultimi anni si è dato avvio a un trend inverso, finalizzato ad aprire centri di ricerca al di fuori della Repubblica popolare.
Hardly a day goes by without news or updates from the smart grid world over newspapers, media, or the internet. They tell us that the world is going to change completely and the business models of the past are doomed: the future is all about storage systems, smart metering, demand side management, electric vehicles, residential PV – all of them interconnected, of course.
Cyber space is a complex environment with many factors and dimensions that make it unstable and, at the same time, fascinating and interesting.