Market scale

Even with elevated tech commercialization capacity, the second lever of regional collaboration is required - the size of the market.

"The Hong Kong market is not viable enough. The city must leverage the professional, capital resources, manufacturing and technology capacity in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area to accelerate economies of scale in technology commercialization," says Tang, who is also the associate director of the Hong Kong Institute of Economics and Business Strategy.

Accelerating the Greater Bay Area regional collaboration needs spatial planning that connects all the required resources. Lawmaker Chiu tells China Daily: "Geographic proximity is important for a platform to network professional, capital and strategic enterprises. The Northern Metropolis can provide the space to aggregate all these inputs in the future."

The SAR government envisages the Hong Kong Park of the Hetao Shenzhen-Hong Kong Science and Technology Innovation Cooperation Zone to be the industry-academia-research platform for transforming R&D results, and as a pilot production base for industries.

The lawmaker advocates the technology parks within San Tin Technopole in the Northern Metropolis to be connected to the Hong Kong Park and Shenzhen Park of Hetao Cooperation Zone with seamless cross-boundary flows of professional, logistics, data and capital, for a comprehensive I&T hub, like the Singaporean "one-north" model.

Situated in the Queenstown area of Singapore, one-north exhibits strong connectivity in I&T development by aggregating government and university research offices, business offices, startup entrepreneurs, incubators, accelerators, training institutes, and even manufacturing facilities, in one geographical location.