At a Cabinet meeting Thursday, Premier Lai Ching-te touted Taiwan's science parks as the locomotive propelling the nation's high-tech industries, generating ever higher levels of investment and production in recent years. In 2017, the parks hit new records for sales revenue, export revenue and number of employees, an achievement he lauded as commendable.
Under a 10-year development plan for the science parks, the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) will focus on networking with local industrial clusters and promoting the parks as real-life proving grounds for emerging technological applications, the premier said. Members of the academic, research and industrial communities will also be invited to join this process and help promote industrial upgrading, improve technical training, and solidify the bedrock that underlies high-tech industrial growth.
MOST said each of the three major science parks will create high-value-added, innovative enterprises that build on the parks' unique strengths. The Hsinchu Science Park, for instance, will apply its industrial advantages to the promotion of artificial intelligence software and create a software development zone. The Central Taiwan Science Park has set its eyes on establishing a flagship, world-class base for smart robot innovators and makers. The Southern Taiwan Science Park, meanwhile, is vigorously building an advanced manufacturing environment for semiconductors, and cooperating with the Shalun Smart Green Energy Science City to establish new clusters of green energy and smart robotics industries in southern Taiwan.