Knowledge Transfer and Entrepreneurship | PolyU

PolyU provides a wealth of resources and initiatives to support entrepreneurship development among students, faculty members, alumni and the larger community. With seed funding, mentoring, training and incubation resources, we promote the spirit of “Do Well, Do Good” and help them realise their entrepreneurial dreams. Harnessing the University’s expertise and resources, the Institute for Entrepreneurship (IfE) provides a wide range of services, fostering entrepreneurship spirit, helping industry create innovative products, and strengthening the competitive edge of enterprises in the global marketplace.

Entrepreneurship funding schemes to seed young start-ups

Under the ethos and spirit of ‘Do Well Do Good’, PolyU has established different entrepreneurship funding schemes for start-ups in collaboration with local and regional partners. Leveraging its partners’ funding and incubation support, current funding schemes offer grants of more than HK$10 million per year, supporting 50 to 60 early-stage start-ups and student entrepreneurship projects.

PolyU Micro Fund Scheme is the first funding initiative to cultivate innovative and entrepreneurial ambience in the PolyU community and to promote knowledge transfer and commercialisation of PolyU’s innovations and technologies. Launched in 2011, the Micro Fund has been nurturing 350+ socially responsible young people with a ‘Do Well Do Good’ entrepreneurship spirit through hands-on business endeavours. With a seed fund of HK$120,000 for each awarded start-up and much needed pre-incubation support, PolyU aims to bolster the awardees’ implementation of high-quality business propositions with a positive social impact.

Advocating entrepreneurship education to nurture future leaders

Driven by an increasingly globalised economy and dynamically changing society, future leaders have to be agile, innovative and entrepreneurial to adapt to new developments, while embracing and overcoming the accompanying challenges. This belief drives PolyU to emphasise strongly and advocate entrepreneurship education to nurture our students as future leaders equipped to be creative, innovative and with the entrepreneurial mind-set, skills, knowledge and practice to succeed.

In addition to courses that offer credits, through the IfE, PolyU has been working closely with industry and community partners to develop a highly experiential and action-based entrepreneurship education programme for students, young graduates, researchers and start-up founders to meet their requirements and challenges along with their entrepreneurial study and pursuit of their goals.

Building a regional entrepreneurial community

The University established PolyU InnoHub in March 2017 as a strategic initiative to further develop PolyU’s leading position in driving innovation and entrepreneurship in the region. InnoHub has been dedicated to promoting communal innovations and entrepreneurship in partnerships with academia, businesses, entrepreneurial intermediaries and angel investors. Since its establishment, 87 start-ups supported by PolyU and POC student project teams have been admitted. They have been benefiting from the infrastructure support, mentoring/consultation with entrepreneurs-in-residence and other community activities available at InnoHub, including joint events with local and regional partners and collaborators.

To further develop the Greater Bay Area (GBA) entrepreneurship support platform, InnoHub (Shenzhen) has also been established at the PolyU Shenzhen Base in the Nanshan District to support start-ups, tapping into the huge market, industry and government resources available in Shenzhen and the GBA.