China is counting innovation as pillar of economic development. The country's science and technology minister says nine areas will be at the center of efforts to drive innovation, focusing on converting technical fruits into business.  

A new pillar of development. China has made a top-level design of innovation for the next three decades. A highlight is to develop new industrial clusters that's led and backed up by technology.

"The outline lists nine areas, including information, intelligent manufacturing, modern agriculture, modern energy, ecological environment protection, ocean and space, new-type urbanization, health and modern service. These are the key areas we'll concentrate on in the future," said Wan Gang, Chinese Science And Technology minister.

China's total R&D expenditure exceeded 1.4 trillion yuan last year, or about 215 billion US dollars. More than 77 percent of this came from the business sector.

But in China, key and core technologies are still controlled by other countries. Many industries are still at the lower-to-medium ends of the global value chain.

The priority now is to speed up converting college and research institutes' research results into business.

Wan Gang also said, "First we abolished the approval procedure. We give them rights to deal with their research results and make profit out of them. Researchers can get over 50 percent of profits. The most important thing is to set up a service mechanism, to help companies, colleges and institutes with the convertion."

In a clear timetable, China aims to become an innovative country by 2020, move to the forefront of innovative countries by 2030, and an innovation power by 2050.