Education, technology, and talent are vital cornerstones in building a modern socialist state. It’s important to understand that technological innovation is fundamentally driven by talent, which in turn is nurtured through education. There’s a dynamic interplay among these elements. President Xi Jinping has highlighted the necessity of fostering a positive cycle between education, technology, and talent development, aligning them with the needs of new productive forces. By advancing education, encouraging technological innovation, and cultivating talent in a cohesive manner, we can unlock human capital’s innovative potential, providing robust intellectual support for significant advancements in knowledge and breakthrough technologies. This synergy ultimately fuels innovation in labor practices, industrial transformations, and production methods. Recognizing and aligning with the characteristics of new productive forces is essential to harness their guiding influence, thereby enhancing the integration of education, technology, and talent development while facilitating the flow of resources to boost social productivity.
Prioritizing innovation is crucial for aligning our objectives. New productive forces signify a more advanced stage of productivity where innovation takes center stage. Technological innovation is fundamental to the development of these forces and is key to promoting the integrated growth of education, technology, and talent. When guided by innovation goals, the trajectories of education, technology, and talent development show clear alignment, each dependent on and reinforcing the others. However, we currently face challenges such as fragmentation and a lack of cohesion among these areas. To tackle these issues, it’s necessary to take a unified approach that promotes education, technological innovation, and talent development. This requires collaborative efforts and refined strategies in education, research, and training to create an interactive ecosystem. We need to enhance the overall effectiveness of our national innovation system through strategic planning and leverage national governance to guide educational initiatives, talent development, and innovation-driven growth. This encompasses creating comprehensive plans, coordinating policies, and establishing integration standards and evaluation systems to ensure that education, technology, and talent work synergistically.
Enhancing collaborative development strengthens systemic integration. Advancing new productive forces is essential for high-quality development. A systematic viewpoint calls for fostering a virtuous cycle where education catalyzes technological growth, technology nurtures innovative talent, and talent propels technological advancement, resulting in a combined effect that exceeds individual accomplishments. Key to this is robust integration among various subsystems to prevent serious deficiencies in critical areas. Observations from developed economies reveal that while education, technology, and talent may not always evolve simultaneously, leading centers in these fields often exhibit similar traits and significant overlap, a testament to effective collaboration and positive cycles among them. As we adapt to new productive forces, we encounter the challenge of shifting our education, technology, and talent sectors from a focus on “scale” to a focus on “quality.” It is imperative to emphasize education’s foundational and guiding role in national development by reforming teaching practices, institutional frameworks, and management systems, while bolstering core disciplines, emerging fields, interdisciplinary studies, and the cultivation of top-tier talent to establish a high-quality education system. Additionally, enhancing the role of technology as a primary engine of productivity is crucial, as is improving our capacity for original and disruptive innovations, refining our innovation ecosystems, and focusing on developing competitive innovation sectors to achieve technological independence and strength.
Optimizing resource allocation is essential to enhancing element mobility. New productive forces inherently depend on an optimized blend of labor, materials, and goals, requiring a new production relationship to support their growth. Promoting the positive cycle of education, technology, and talent hinges on invigorating these subsystems to facilitate broader and more efficient resource allocation. This process entails removing barriers that restrict the mobility of labor, knowledge, technology, and capital while fostering a fair and dynamic market environment that attracts various resources toward the development of new productive forces. People are the most dynamic and creative contributors, making talent crucial as a driving force for progress. To harness this talent potential, it’s important to improve recruitment, training, utilization, and mobility processes while establishing a system that appreciates contributions based on market evaluations, thereby accurately reflecting the value of talent. Additionally, developing a new collaborative national framework that emphasizes organized research and leverages major technological platforms will enhance governmental support in critical areas such as infrastructure, macro policies, and high-standard market systems. This cooperative approach will expedite the transfer of innovations from the lab to the production line. We must embrace the global technological revolution and industrial transition by promoting high levels of openness and engaging deeply in international industrial cooperation. This will foster a competitive and open innovation ecosystem that aggregates technological breakthroughs, intellectual resources, and top talent from around the world, ultimately enhancing the collaborative development of education, technology, and talent.
(Source: Economic Daily, Author: Zhao Zheng, Director of the Comprehensive Research Office at the Public Administration and Human Resources Research Institute, Development Research Center of the State Council)
