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At the entrance of the Dalian International Conference Center, an art installation that "reads" brainwaves captured the attention of delegates on June 23. As an experiencer put on a wearable sensor, the artwork pulsed and shifted in real-time, mirroring the intensity of their neural activity. Nearby, a robotic horse equipped with AI-powered cameras analyzed and reacted to the facial expressions and micro-movements of onlookers, drawing gasps of wonder. These were not mere tech novelties but vivid metaphors for the focal point of the 2026 Summer Davos: Innovation is leaving the laboratory and entering the fabric of daily life.
From June 23 to 25, the forum, named after the high-profile annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) held in winter in the Swiss mountain resort of Davos, took place in the northeastern coastal city of Dalian, Liaoning Province. Also known as the WEF's 17th Annual Meeting of the New Champions, the event brought together over 1,700 participants from more than 90 countries and regions, a record attendance that signals a global hunger for solutions in a fragmented world.
Its theme, Innovating at Scale, reflected a pivotal shift in focus. As the WEF's Managing Director Mirek Dušek put it, the core question is no longer just about creating a single "wow effect" technology, but about how to ensure the opportunities from AI and other breakthroughs are more widely shared.
From 'wow' to 'how'
In his keynote address at the opening plenary on June 24, Chinese Premier Li Qiang used four keywords to describe the start of the country's 15th Five-Year Plan period (2026-30): stability, innovation, dynamism and integration.
China's economy grew by 5 percent in the first quarter and has maintained sound momentum, Li said, emphasizing that such stability at a massive volume of 140 trillion yuan ($20.5 trillion) has injected precious certainty into a world fraught with uncertainties.
On innovation, Li said that China's average daily AI token usage, a metric measuring the frequency of consumer use of AI services, reached hundreds of trillions by the end of May, leading the world, and embodied intelligence has moved into large-scale commercial application.
"The world is driven by AI, robotics, quantum technology, and bio-manufacturing. Technology has completely changed our production methods, consumption patterns, work styles and lifestyles," Gim Huay Neo, the WEF's Executive Director, said at a pre-forum press conference on June 16.
A flagship release at the forum is the Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2026 report, which identified innovations poised to reshape industries in the next three to five years, including ubiquitous energy grids, direct lithium extraction and quantum simulation for drug discovery. Forum participants discussed how, after years of a software-centric AI wave, transformative technologies are moving from screens to the physical systems that underpin modern economies.
"The discussion has moved from the conceptual and laboratory level to large-scale, accelerated industrial application," observed Zhou Yuxiang, CEO of Black Lake Technologies, a Chinese industrial software firm attending the forum for the fifth time.
This shift, however, requires more than just technological breakthroughs. "Scalable innovation requires the synergy of policies, capital, infrastructure, talents and multi-party collaboration to establish a solid foundation, innovate collaboration models and improve operational mechanisms," Neo said, adding "it can continuously create value, bringing about comprehensive and successive effects, rather than just a simple momentary impact."
The Chinese innovation ecosystem is evolving from "point-based breakthroughs" to "scalable innovation," Deloitte China CEO Dora Liu said at the forum.
Federico Torti, head of Advanced Manufacturing at the WEF, highlighted that Chinese cases now account for over half of the newly designated Global Lighthouse Factories, the world's most advanced manufacturing facilities. "China's advantage lies in combining massive industrial capacity with a dense innovation ecosystem," he said, adding "new technologies can be quickly tested, optimized and scaled in real manufacturing environments."
"Scale is what drives efficiency. And for AI, the key is not just developing the tech—it's delivering tangible results on the factory floor," Li Dongsheng, founder and Chairman of electronics giant TCL Group, told Beijing Review.
Unity amid fragmentation
Yet scaling innovation across borders requires more than domestic capacity. It demands global collaboration in an era of fragmentation. The 2026 Summer Davos took place against a backdrop of geopolitical tensions and regional conflicts. Within the conference halls, a unanimous consensus emerged: Innovation cannot be built in isolation.
Ana Fernanda Maiguashca, Director of the Private Competitiveness Council of Colombia, offered a historical perspective. "I think we are in a fragmented world," she told Beijing Review. "The last time that we saw a world that was so fragmented was between World War I and World War II." She warned that while trade is increasingly used as an "instrument for political discourse," it is ultimately "the local producer who bears the costs."
Premier Li addressed this fragmentation, calling for deeper cooperation. "In this new landscape, only through stronger cooperation can we generate more breakthroughs, and only through stronger cooperation can we rise to the diverse risks and challenges before us," he said, adding "an interconnected global market enables more efficient flows and allocation of production factors, and significantly reduces innovation costs. An inclusive and collaborative innovation network allows ideas to interact and converge more freely, accelerating breakthroughs in frontier technologies."
That call for collaboration was echoed by business leaders on the ground. "The coming decade is the decade of partnership, which is always important and one of the key issues to impact innovation. You need to grow bigger with partners. No country can go it alone," Xie Chengrun, CEO of Sino Biopharm, a leading Chinese pharmaceutical company, told Beijing Review.
For many developing economies, the conversation about scalable innovation is inseparable from a more fundamental question: How to move up the value chain. While hailing China's zero-tariff policy for all African countries with which it has diplomatic relations as a positive step, Gabon's Minister of Digital Economy and Innovation, Mark-Alexandre Doumba, said his expectations go much further. "What we're hoping to see is Chinese companies invest more in our countries in manufacturing, in production, so that we don't just sell raw materials, but that we can start selling more complex products," he told Beijing Review.
Bajabulile Tshabalala, Lead Independent Director of South Africa's Eskom Holdings, the country's largest electricity producer, framed the energy transition as an industrial opportunity. "We also see this transition as a way for South Africa to further industrialize, but also for the region to industrialize," she told Beijing Review, adding "we think that South Africa is a perfect gateway for any country that wants to go into the rest of the continent."
Scaling green
Nowhere is the gap between pilot projects and large-scale deployment more visible—or more urgent—than in the energy transition. In this sector, two cases from China—one digital, one physical—illustrate how the "lab to life" ethos is playing out on the ground.
In June, the power company of Dalian, the host city of the 2026 Summer Davos, deployed a next-generation smart grid system that unified the main and distribution networks for the first time. This enables real-time monitoring and control of distributed solar and wind power, from ultra-high-voltage lines down to the household level. The system underpins the forum's commitment to running entirely on green power and is being promoted as a replicable model for other cities grappling with the intermittency of renewable power supply.
Meanwhile, a parallel discussion at the forum titled No Power, No AI focused on the immense energy demands of the emerging technology. One proposed solution leverages the idle potential of electric vehicles (EVs). Robin Zeng, founder of Chinese battery maker CATL, framed China's 40-million-plus EV fleet as a massive distributed energy network: Each EV can serve as a battery storage unit to power AI infrastructure.
A similar vision is already being operationalized in China's mega computing resource transfer project dubbed Eastern Data, Western Computing, which places energy-hungry data centers in western regions where solar and wind power is abundant, effectively sending data west instead of transmitting electricity east.
These cases suggest that China's energy transition is not merely about building more solar farms, but about creating smart systems, such as intelligent connected vehicles and data-driven grids, that can scale alongside the digital economy.
China opportunity 2.0
For multinationals, China's transition from the "world's factory" to the "world's innovation accelerator" is a daily operational reality.
The key to competing in China is organizational autonomy, Luca Forte, Supply Chain Director at Italy's Eldor Corp.—a multinational leader in the automotive industry and a partner of major car manufacturing companies worldwide, told Beijing Review. "The Chinese market is very competitive. You have to adapt very quickly. Even if you are a foreign company, you need to make sure your organization in China is autonomous... It's the key to making a successful journey in China," he said, adding his company, which has had a factory in Dalian since 2011, now leverages its research and development (R&D) and production in Dalian to support global operations.
Alexander Schellong of Germany's Schwarz Digits, the digital arm of the major Germany retailer Schwarz Group, attending Summer Davos for the first time, said he is "particularly interested in trends in robotics, AI and the China speed of innovation." He offered a telling anecdote: "Two weeks ago, I was on a panel in Berlin. All of the robots that people used to display examples came from China because none of the European vendors were able to deliver. Right now, the Chinese manufacturers are able to deliver."
In his remarks, Premier Li outlined three pillars of China's innovation drive. First, innovation has been forged through relentless, painstaking effort. During the 14th Five-Year Plan period (2021-25), China's R&D expenditure grew at an average annual rate of 10 percent, ranking second globally. Second, innovation has been tempered through extensive applications across industries. Any valuable technological achievement, with the backing of Chinese manufacturing, can be rapidly turned into an actual product. Third, innovation has been nurtured in an enabling environment. China has established 24 of the world's top 100 innovation clusters, ranking first globally for three consecutive years.
He also addressed international anxiety about China's sci-tech and industrial innovation with the term "China opportunity 2.0." In the past, China's big market and low-cost production factors provided the world with market dividends. Now it is also offering more and more innovation dividends with its technological progress and industrial upgrading. For enterprises around the world, "China opportunity 2.0" means across-the-board innovation empowerment and high-return investment opportunities, Li said.
The numbers tell a compelling story. In 2025, newly established foreign-funded enterprises in China's tech services sector reached 14,000, up 27.2 percent year on year. More than 8,000 overseas-funded enterprises increased their existing investments, a rise of over 10 percent. In the first four months of 2026 alone, over 3,000 made additional investments.
On the AI front, China's core AI industry value exceeded 1.2 trillion yuan ($176.1 billion) in 2025, with over 6,000 AI companies operating in the country. Chinese AI firms attracted roughly $13.9 billion in global venture capital last year, ranking third worldwide. China's open-source AI models have been downloaded over 10 billion times globally.
As the Summer Davos wrapped up, it left a clear impression: The era of innovation for its own sake is waning. The future belongs to those who can transform the "wow" of the laboratory into the "how" of the factory, the hospital and the home.
"In the next few years, we will see AI-driven breakthroughs in drug discovery. But the real challenge remains clinical trials, as they still consume the most capital and time. How we crack that will define the future of R&D," Xie said.
Premier Li offered a final reflection. "Science and technology thrives in application. The most difficult leap in innovation is often not the one inside the lab, but the one across the 'Darwinian Sea' that separates the lab from the market." He also extended a direct invitation that China welcomes businesses from around the world to invest and do business here, share in the new opportunities China offers, and join China in building a brighter future.
In that race to scale, China is providing a blueprint that the world is keen to study and adopt. The challenge now is whether the world can summon the political will to ensure that this innovation, scaled and shared, serves not just the few, but the many.
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