EE Times
Date: 06.06.19
By: Nitin Dahad
Taipei – It’s not often you meet a government minister with genuine motivation to address
Chen Liang-Gee
the needs of the office he or she is in. I’ve met many over the years, and they often they say all the right buzzwords for the moment and for the audience, just to gain political points and win votes. In fact, I met one of the leadership candidates for the UK prime minister’s role at an event in London last evening, and not a word of his interaction with me or his speech seemed genuine. He was just after votes.
But that certainly isn’t the case with Taiwan’s Liang-Gee Chen, the minister for the office of science and technology (MOST) in the country. EE Times sat down with him at Innovex in Taipei last week, a startup exhibition and pitching forum that ran alongside Computex. As my colleague Junko Yoshida previously wrote, he’s labeled as Taiwan’s startup minister but really knows what he’s talking about, since he also happens to be an IEEE fellow.
Chen Liang-Gee
Chen is out to make a difference for Taiwan’s innovation economy, and I had the opportunity to interview him after I had visited various startups, accelerators and a fascinating tour of the country’s Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) with its huge complex in Hsinchu City. I also was a judge at the 2019 Computex d&i awards, so really got a flavor of the breadth and diversity of Taiwan’s large as well as emerging technology companies.
What struck me most during this visit to Taipei and Hsinchu is that Taiwan is putting a big effort into changing its image as simply a manufacturing hub for the electronics industry. What I saw (and maybe my program was intentionally focused this way) is many startup companies building upon the hardware heritage to provide services, and these were mainly around artificial intelligence (AI) addressing real world problems – like medtech and healthcare, as well as agriculture and manufacturing. [FULL STORY]
