2026 Zhongguancun Forum Annual Conference | Leveraging the benchmark leading role, Beijing will steer entrepreneurial incubation to a higher level

(Source: Beijing Business Today)

As a crucial link connecting technological innovation with industrial development, entrepreneurship incubators are shifting from expansion in scale to improving quality, from comprehensive incubation to specialized deep cultivation, and from local development to global coordination. On March 28, at the 2026 Zhongguancun Forum annual conference parallel forum—the Global Benchmark Incubators Forum—Yang Pengyu, Director of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Service Division of the Beijing Municipal Science and Technology Commission and the Zhongguancun Administration, said that Beijing’s educational and scientific research resources are abundant and its innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem is active. After years of development, it has taken the lead in building a well-established, diversified entrepreneurship incubation 4.0 ecosystem, becoming a core base for serving the national innovation strategy and leading high-quality regional development. Next, Beijing will promote entrepreneurship incubation to take a leap to a higher level of capabilities.

There are 30 benchmark incubators across the city

The report “Nature Index—Research Cities 2025” shows that Beijing has ranked first globally among research cities for nine consecutive years. In 2025, the R&D expenditure intensity reached 6.58%. The number and valuations of unicorns, as well as the value of technology contract transactions, are all ranked first in the country.

Yang Pengyu said that on this foundation, Beijing’s entrepreneurship incubation has also achieved a dual improvement in both scale and effectiveness. The total number of entrepreneurship incubation institutions of all types across the city has exceeded 600. Among them, there are 30 benchmark incubators and 121 municipal-level incubators, forming a multi-tier, wide-coverage incubation landscape. At the same time, Beijing’s incubator capital empowerment effect continues to expand. More than one-third of the incubators across the city have set up investment funds, with the total fund size exceeding 75 billion yuan.

It is understood that Beijing’s entrepreneurship incubation has developed for more than 30 years, charting a distinctive path characterized by deep foundations, full coverage, strong quality and efficiency, and innovation-driven development. Benchmark incubators are a new incubation model that Beijing proposed first, and they also mark the entry of entrepreneurship incubation into the 4.0 era. Since 2022, Beijing has focused on segmented industry fields such as original innovative drugs, optoelectronics, instruments and sensors, and the metaverse. It has continuously supported the construction of 30 benchmark incubators, covering 8 districts in the city and the Economic Development Zone, and has formed six distinctive innovation incubation models: first-class incubation talent that leads and drives others; preemptive in-depth incubation of hard technologies; improvement of the capability level of professional technical platforms; coordinated incubation of industrial chains and supply chains; incubation acceleration linkage and follow-on connection; and the integration and bridging of international incubation resources. This has helped the industry enter a new development stage centered on “improving quality and efficiency, and pursuing excellence.”

A dedicated policy package covers incubators and in-incubation enterprises

Yang Pengyu said that Beijing improves the quality and upgrading of incubation services by driving policy iteration. For example, in the revised municipal-level incubator management measures, Beijing further highlights the core goal of early-stage investment empowerment and nurturing high-quality enterprises, strengthens the ability of incubators to generate professional service revenue and operate through market-based mechanisms, and guides incubators to accelerate the shift from scale expansion to deeper capacity building. At the same time, it also uses policy support to build a tiered incubation system.

Li Ping, Party Secretary of the Beijing Technology Innovation Promotion Center, said, “Currently, across the city, we have initially formed a tiered, connected entrepreneurship incubation system characterized by ‘benchmark incubators demonstrating and leading the way, municipal-level science and technology enterprise incubators providing backbone support, and other science and technology enterprise incubators having complete functions.’”

Yang Pengyu emphasized that Beijing also actively promotes innovation policies such as talent, finance, and immigration and exit-entry to incubators, especially by clustering such policies around benchmark incubators to form a dedicated policy package covering both incubators and enterprises in incubation.

Continuously improving the “incubation–acceleration–industrialization” relay mechanism

Li Nanlin, Director of the Incubation System Construction Division at the Torch High-Tech Industrial Development Center of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said that incubators, as key hubs connecting the innovation chain, industrial chain, capital chain, and talent chain, are an important front for cultivating new quality productive forces. Promoting their excellence and upgrading is both a necessary requirement to adapt to the development of integration between science and technology and industries, and a key measure to build a modern industrial system.

According to the introduction, from the national strategy level, incubators should connect the innovation chain forward and link the industrial chain backward. From the industry development positioning, on the one hand, entrepreneurship incubation gathers innovative achievements and talent from universities and research institutes. On the other hand, it links the market and resources on the industrial side, becoming an important bridging link for deep integration of science, technology, and industries. From the trend of science and technology innovation and entrepreneurship development in the new era, incubators must break from traditional thinking, shifting from single-space service to empowering with all factors, and from generalized incubation to specialized industrial incubation.

Li Nanlin believes that as Beijing is a core hub for national science and technology innovation, incubator development has long been at the forefront nationwide, and in the future it should give stronger play to the role of benchmark leadership. “First, focus on major national strategies and do a good job in incubator layout in high-tech frontier fields, solving the ‘bottleneck’ problem. Second, guide universities and research institutes, leading enterprises, and investment institutions to jointly build high-level incubators and create a science-and-technology-to-industry ecology. Third, deepen openness and cooperation, integrate global innovation resources, and build an international incubation platform. Fourth, dare to take the lead and explore and pilot ahead of time, seek innovative incubation models, and build an incubation system with more comprehensive innovation factors and higher energy density, providing experience and solutions for the whole country.”

“Next, Beijing will promote entrepreneurship incubation to leap to a higher level of capabilities. This includes continuing to advance the construction of benchmark incubators by keeping up its strategic layout serving frontiers and future industries, continuously improving the relay mechanisms of incubation, acceleration, and industrialization, continuously cultivating hard-technology enterprises and high-quality projects, and accelerating the formation of industry clusters with regional advantages. It will also promote the deep integration of achievement transformation and entrepreneurship incubation, strengthen coordination between incubators and universities and research institutes, and link up with technology transfer institutions, and so on,” Yang Pengyu said.

Beijing Business reporter Cheng Liang

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