Photo: Dr-ing Benny Drescher, Chief Technology Officer of FLAIR (left), and Dr Charleston Sin, Executive Director, MIT Hong Kong Innovation Node

(25 May, 2021) Dr Charleston Sin, Executive Director of MIT Hong Kong Innovation Node, visited FLAIR today, offering his thoughts on innovation ecosystem and research directions to the centre.

Prior to joining MIT, Dr Sin has held executive positions at various international IT companies such as VMWare, Nortel Networks and Cisco. He is firmly committed to promoting innovation between Hong Kong and the Greater Bay Area (GBA).

In his sharing with FLAIR’s research staff, Dr Sin introduced the works of MIT Hong Kong Node on talent training, technology innovation and startup support and talked about research directions and industrial innovation. He said the development of Innovation Ecosystem has been a growing trend. Equally important R&D teams should consider the target market during solution design. He also presented MIT’s 24-step product development plan and ways to improve the implementation process.

In addition, Dr Sin shared his spin-off and startup experience, citing now to be the best time in the past 20 years for spin-off. He also revealed his experience on working with companies in China and encouraged FLAIR to collaborate with companies in GBA, with Shenzhen already a smart city and being able to process hardware-related projects very rapidly.