Technology opens the door but institutional support, collaboration remain crucial elements

As leaders from business, government, academia, and the innovation sector gathered this week in Dalian, in Northeast China’s Liaoning province, for the Annual Meeting of the New Champions 2026, also known as the Summer Davos, one question deserved particular attention: Why do some innovations become part of everyday life while others remain prototypes, pilot projects or just promising laboratory results?

The question of how innovation can scale up is especially relevant as the world searches for new engines of growth. Artificial intelligence, clean energy, biotechnology, smart transportation, digital payments and space technology offer new possibilities.

Yet possibility alone does not translate into public value. A bridge must be built between invention and widespread adoption.

That bridge is institutions.

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Innovation scales up when society builds the institutions which transform bright ideas into trusted, funded and widely adopted realities.

Technology opens the door, but institutions make people, markets and governments willing to walk through it. A prototype proves that something can work. Scale shows that society is ready to use it widely.

China offers several examples of scaling. BeiDou, for instance, is not only a story of launching a satellite navigation system. Its real breakthrough lies in how that system has transformed into an ecosystem of applications. BeiDou is now integrated into smartphones, transportation, agriculture, logistics, location-based services, and various civilian applications.

The satellites operate in space, but their economic value grows when they are linked to standards, devices, industries, and everyday services.

BeiDou has scaled not only because of its technological sophistication, but because institutional support has turned strategic infrastructure into a public platform and application market.

A similar lesson comes from new energy vehicles. Electric cars do not become mainstream simply because of better batteries or attractive designs.

Consumers need assurance: availability of charging infrastructure, reasonable operating costs, after-sales services, and a supportive energy ecosystem. This is why new energy vehicles require more than products.

They require policy packages, incentives, standards, charging networks, battery-swapping systems, industrial investment, and coordination among government, automakers, battery producers, and energy providers.

Hence, the innovation being scaled is not just the car, but an entire low-carbon mobility system.

China’s high-speed rail and the Fuxing train show how standardization can become an engine of scale. High-speed rail is a transportation project, but at the national scale it becomes an industrial system, a public service system, and a system of trust.

For high-speed trains to operate safely, punctually, and across many regions, they require technical standards, efficient operators, rail networks, signaling systems, manufacturing capacity, maintenance systems, financing, and a culture of safety.

Fuxing shows that innovation is not just about speed, but also about organizing technology into a replicable, expandable, and trustworthy system.

Indonesia’s Quick Response Code Indonesian Standard (QRIS) is another example. Before QRIS, digital payments were fragmented, with multiple applications and service providers, each having its own code and system.

For small merchants, especially micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises, this diversity was a barrier.

QRIS changed this by introducing a national standard, enabling one code to accept payments from different applications. Here, innovation becomes a public utility. The regulator does not merely supervise the market; it builds a shared standard so that innovation is used more easily by millions of people.

QRIS shows that scalable innovation does not always require complex technology. Sometimes, the most crucial innovation is a standard that makes technology simple, affordable and inclusive. When small shops, street vendors, tourism actors, public transport users, and everyday consumers use the same payment standard, innovation ceases to be a novelty and becomes a new habit.

From BeiDou to high-speed rail and QRIS, a similar pattern can be seen. Innovation scales up when there is public trust, standardization, long-term financing, supporting infrastructure and collaborative governance.

This message was vital for the Summer Davos 2026. The world is not short of great ideas. What is often lacking is the mechanism to scale those ideas to work socially.

Therefore, global forums such as the Annual Meeting of the New Champions should not only celebrate new technologies, but also discuss how those technologies can become trusted, funded, adopted, and sustained.

Today’s “new champions” are not the first inventors of technology but the societies, companies, cities, and countries that can build bridges between discovery and broad adoption.

They understand that innovation does not just come from laboratories, but also thrives in institutions, standards, financing, infrastructure, and public trust.

Recognizing this challenge, Indonesia’s National Research and Innovation Agency has launched an initiative to strengthen the bridge between research and real-world impact.

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The concept is simple but strategic: Indonesia needs a shared home for innovation where ready-to-use technologies can be displayed, connected, licensed, incubated, and matched with industries, state-owned enterprises, local governments, universities, investors, startups, and communities.

As a national innovation showcase, hub, and one-stop service, the initiative embodies the principle that innovation can scale only when good ideas are supported by institutions that connect knowledge, intellectual property, financing, co-creation, co-development, and public use.

Ultimately, innovation is not only invented but also organized. Breakthroughs open possibilities, but institutions turn those possibilities into realities.

The future will not be shaped only by those with the best ideas, but by those who can enable good ideas to grow into real, broad, and sustainable public value.

The author is a senior researcher and director of Policy Formulation for Research, Technology, and Innovation, at Indonesia’s National Research and Innovation Agency.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.