Zhuhai, the dynamic prefecture-level city in southern Guangdong province, is going all out to lure innovative professionals and projects to it from around the world, in the wider bid to emerge as a creative leader in the huge and rapidly developing bay area where it is located.

The Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao greater bay area — which covers Hong Kong and Macao special administrative regions, and nine cities in Guangdong province including Zhuhai — has been designed and earmarked by authorities to become an important global hub for innovation, finance, shipping and trade by 2030.

Zhuhai is connected with the two SARs by a bridge, one of the world’s longest such fixed links, which is expected to open by the end of this year.

According to the local government, the city rolled out an implementation plan one year ago, in which it targets six specific growth springboards in terms of high-end industrial clusters, technology incubators, innovation talent, venture capital, protection and utilization of intellectual property and quality standards.

The government plans to set up a big data research institute as an effort to build up the innovation points, which will target hiring a pool of top-flight international scientific and technological professionals, including scientists from the United Kingdom’s renowned Oxford University, specialized in the big data area.

On its completion and start of operations, due for 2020, the institute will work on an open and co-sharing system — based on the big data from governments, the manufacturing industry and the livelihood-related sectors — to streamline and improve applications in social governance, the public services, enhance industrial development and the high-tech transformation of the manufacturing sector.

The Zhuhai Institute of Advanced Technology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a government-funded organization specialized in technology transformation, has set up several incubators and off-shore innovation centers with world-class partners to upgrade the city’s innovation capability.

It started to run an incubator in May with the Texas Medical Center in the United States, one of the world’s biggest medical complexes, that focuses on genetic engineering, cell engineering, biomedical materials and bioinformatics.

This will integrate innovative resources in the US and nurture quality projects, which will ultimately serve the industrial upgrade of Zhuhai, according to the institute.

Before that, it set up an off-shore innovation center and a parallel incubator in Israel, an off-shore innovation center in Hong Kong and signed an agreement with the University of Macao to build an incubator and a joint laboratory.

Officials said the local government is encouraging integrated circuit design companies to work with the State-level laboratory in the University of Macao on developing ultra-advanced technology in the field.