Interview by Yuki Lei
Being a public servant has long been regarded as the lifelong aspiration of many young people in Macau, however, for Garvie Huang Ka Wai his dream is to become a role model for Macau’s young people, by setting up a science and technology company, even striving to establish a Macau Youth Innovation and Entrepreneurship Base, to inspire both Hong Kong and local youths to engage in technological innovation together.
Macau-based Huang, co-founder of Beijing Micro Inspection Technology Co. Ltd., is a second-year student majoring in Energy and Power, Electrical Engineering and its Automation at Tsinghua University in Beijing. He told the Post by phone on Sunday: “When I was in high school, my idea of myself was that I wanted to get an advanced degree and then go back to the University of Macau to work as a faculty member and do scientific research, but now I’m thinking that I want to found a technology company,” adding that as a “relatively” young entrepreneur raised in Macau, he hopes to utilise resources and set up a platform in the mainland to bring Macau-led hardening technology* products to Macau and also the Guangdong-Macau In-depth Cooperation Zone in Hengqin: “Macau’s mission to me is apparent, that is, I hope that more young people like me can boldly go to start up their own business”.
In recent years, Macau has been actively promoting its “1+4” strategy of ensuring the local economy’s appropriately diversified development, which emphasises technological innovation, continues to strengthen basic research and encourages the development of industry-academia-research fusion, in the hope of integrating more innovative resources and gathering more innovative elements, thereby bringing more opportunities for Macau’s technological development, Chief Executive Ho Iat Seng said in a speech in 2023.
Huang, who is in his twenties, first started to participate in various innovation and entrepreneurship competitions when he was a Form 3 student. According to his awards and honours, among others, Huang won a prize in the “2023 Macau Youth Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition”, by Parafuturo de Macau (a local company) and The Association for Promotion of Science and Technology of Macau in conjunction with the Macao Young Entrepreneur Incubation Centre, for his micro-inspection technology for electrical machines, which integrates 5G, Internet of Things (IoT) big data, AI inspection and automation.
Huang, director of the Macao Innovation and Invention Association and president of Lou Hau Science and Technology Society, said that he was currently striving to set up a Tsinghua University Macau Youth Innovation and Entrepreneurship Base, the core members of which will be a “multidisciplinary undergraduate internationalisation team from Tsinghua University and Peking University”, with the plan that 70 percent of them will be Macau students.
According to Huang, the project, which is now underway, aims to combine the output of university innovation and the training of top talents with the needs of Macau’s economic and social development, to improve the quality and efficiency of the transformation of scientific and technological achievements, and to realise the common goal of developing Macau’s first new quality productive forces involving science and technology, cultivating talents as the first resource, and enhancing Macau’s first driving force of innovation, with the launch of project roadshows and industry research projects, as well as the setting-up of a mechanism of “unveiling local demands”, in which the base will regularly identify development difficulties and technical demands from enterprises in the industry under Macau’s jurisdiction and submit them to Tsinghua University.
As a post-00s entrepreneur, Huang has been subjected to a lot of doubt, and he also had a few times when he wanted to give up his dream of becoming an entrepreneur, but his thoughts were quickly dispelled: “Macau has a very good business environment, including its tax policy, to encourage, young people in particular, to launch their own business, but very few young people say that they want to go into the science and technology industry, which I think is a shortcoming in Macau but already well developed in mainland cities, such as Beijing and Shenzhen, where we [Macau students studying in the mainland] can learn, develop and transform projects there, and take them back to Macau”.
When asked about Macau’s Introduction of Admission Schemes for Talents, Professionals and Entrepreneurs, Huang said: “We are not afraid of this challenge as we don’t think it will create competition, on the contrary, we can maximise the use of resources in both places.”
*Systems hardening is a collection of tools, techniques, and best practices to reduce vulnerability in technology applications, systems, infrastructure, firmware, and other areas. The goal of systems hardening is to reduce security risk by eliminating potential attack vectors and condensing the system’s attack surface. – Source: BeyondTrust
This file photo taken in May shows Garvie Huang Ka Wai posing on the sidelines of a public event. – Photo: Maria Cheang Ut Meng
