From Zero to One in China: How XJTLU Is Building a New Venture Creation System

Innovation depends on one deceptively difficult breakthrough: moving from zero to one. It’s the moment an idea becomes a prototype, a product, or the foundation of a company. In the West, universities serve as discovery engines, handing off promising research to private venture capital and accelerators to commercialise. The academic–commercial continuum is connected, but not integrated.

China’s innovation ecosystem is developing along a different trajectory. As the country expands its domestic zero-to-one capacity - an increasingly important priority within national innovation strategies - universities are expected not only to educate talent but to play an active role in the creation and commercialisation of new technologies. They are becoming engines of venture formation as well as centres of research.

The XEC Model: A University Built for Innovation

At Xi’an Jiaotong–Liverpool University’s Entrepreneurship Campus (XEC) in Taicang, this emerging model is being put into practice at scale. XEC is structured as a network of industry-themed schools, spanning AI, Robotics, Intelligent Manufacturing, Chips, and more, each equipped with substantial fabrication and prototyping facilities (collectively forming a platform called the Innovation Factory). This structure matters because it collapses the distance between learning, making, and venture formation.

Figure: XEC Campus bird’s eye view - each U-shaped building houses a specialist industry school with state-of-the-art prototyping facilities.

XEC is not a traditional university faculty with entrepreneurial “add-ons.” It is a purpose-built innovation environment designed to bridge education, industry, and venture creation. What differentiates XEC is not only the technology, but the integration:

• Each school maintains its own technical teams and workshops capable of supporting rapid prototyping.

• Students work directly on industry-sourced problems throughout their degree rather than hypothetical coursework.

• The Entrepreneurship and Enterprise Hub coordinates the industrial partnerships, academic programmes, and real-world challenges flowing into every school.

• Every team has dedicated Pathfinders, these are like Entrepreneurs in Residence that provide business and technical support to their entrepreneurial projects.

It’s worth pausing to emphasise the sheer scale of activity at XEC. This year alone, the campus enrolled 1,000 students, and intake is still growing. As this is a three-year programme, that headline figure understates reality: at any given moment, closer to 3,000 students are actively engaged in venture-oriented work. Every student is organised into teams of six to eight and assigned a real industry project of their choosing, translating into roughly 140 entrepreneurial projects per cohort. Each team receives both technical and commercial mentorship, a dedicated budget, and access to state-of-the-art prototyping facilities, with the explicit expectation that they will deliver a functional prototype and a viable business plan by the end of the programme. The outputs are not hypothetical: working prototypes, pilot data, and, crucially, ideas that are mature enough to flow directly into the campus’s in-house venture builder, X³ CoVenture.

X³ CoVenture: The Venture Engine

If XEC forms the ecosystem, X³ CoVenture serves as its dedicated venture builder: a structured engine for taking ideas from concept to investable early-stage companies. While the “venture studio” concept remains relatively new in China compared with the US and Europe, X³ CoVenture stands out as one of the first structured venture-builder models embedded directly within a major research ecosystem.

X³ launched with around 30 projects in its first year and is doubling that output in its second. For a university-based venture builder, this level of throughput places it among the most ambitious models globally.

Its methodology operates across three stages:

1. Innovation & Experimentation (Dream Hub)

Competitions, ideation workshops, and industry challenges help surface promising ideas and teams.

2. Project Incubation (Dream Foundry)

Selected projects receive structured support through the “3 Cs”: Coaching, Capital, and Competence resources. This is where prototypes are built, iterated, and shaped into ventures.

3. Acceleration & Industrial Integration (Dream Park)

Projects that demonstrate traction progress to acceleration, which is closely aligned with regional industrial development. Support may include:

• startup grants

• subsidised office and lab space

• access to industrial parks

• introductions to manufacturing partners

The aim is to embed new ventures into the region’s mature innovation and industrial infrastructure, supporting them through the earliest stages of growth.

Finally, X³ is not just an advisory programme - it has its own fund. Successful companies are provided with direct equity investment, alongside technical resources and mentorship.

For deep-tech founders, where prototyping, validation, and early testing are costly, this combination of capital and infrastructure dramatically reduces the friction of the zero-to-one phase.

A Coordinated Model for Venture Creation

The coordination between university capability, industry partners, and regional support mechanisms enables a level of coherence that is rare in university innovation ecosystems. Instead of moving between disconnected institutions, founders experience a continuous path in a single campus:

Idea → Prototype → Venture → Early industrial integration

This kind of orchestration is aligned with China’s broader ambition to develop regionally anchored innovation ecosystems capable of generating and commercialising new technologies at scale.

It is a pioneering model, neither a copy of Western venture studios nor a traditional university incubator. It reflects a new architecture of innovation emerging in the country.

A Lens into the System: My Role

My own work sits across these layers and offers a practical vantage point on how the system functions.

Entrepreneur in Residence (“Pathfinder”)

I support teams from ideation through prototyping, strategy, and early market understanding. The scale means that in my first six months I have worked with around 200 would-be founders. At that volume, the qualities that distinguish exceptional founders (adaptability, clarity, resilience, vision) become immediately visible.

Biotech Venture Lead

I help connect X³’s investment and venture-building capability with the new biotech incubator being established in Suzhou, developing its foundational systems, partnerships, and strategic direction.

Independent Venture and Advisory Work

Alongside my university role, I continue to advise and collaborate with deep tech startups and VCs across the US, UK, Europe, APAC, while developing BioKeiretsu, my framework for interconnected synbio and biomanufacturing ecosystems.

The Emerging Architecture of Innovation

What is taking shape in Taicang is not a Silicon Valley analogue, nor a simple extension of existing university entrepreneurship models. It is a more deliberate attempt to solve a very specific problem: how to make zero-to-one venture creation repeatable inside an ecosystem that already knows how to scale.

For a long time, there was an implicit division of labour. Much of the West specialised in early-stage invention, while China excelled at manufacturing, supply chains, and deployment. That separation worked, until it didn’t. Today, the strategic constraint is no longer scale, but the reliable conversion of ideas into viable, industrially relevant ventures.

XEC and X³ CoVenture are best understood in that light. They do not romanticise entrepreneurship, nor do they treat company formation as an accidental by-product of research. Instead, zero-to-one is treated as a capability that can be designed for: with structure, incentives, capital, and physical infrastructure aligned from the outset.

While I am sure this model will produce globally iconic companies this is, in some sense, the wrong immediate question. The more interesting development is that venture creation itself is being pulled inside the university–industry system, rather than outsourced to a fragmented external market of accelerators, incubators, and early-stage funds.

The result is a continuous pathway: idea, prototype, venture, early industrial integration; operating at a scale that would be difficult to reproduce through looser, more individualised models. What is striking, from inside the system, is not any single outcome but the direction of travel: zero-to-one is no longer treated as exceptional or accidental, but as something that can be supported, repeated, and improved over time. That shift, more than any headline success, may prove to be the lasting significance of what is being built in Taicang.