Dr Erik Forsberg, STINT Representative in China and ASEAN, presents the latest report in our Academic Internationalisation Outlook series. This report, launched on 28 August 2026, focuses on the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area science and innovation cluster.
This STINT Outlook provides an overview of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA), an eleven-city region around the Pearl River Delta in southern China, encompassing one of the world’s largest urban concentrations of scientific and technological activity. At its core, the Shenzhen-Hong Kong-Guangzhou cluster is ranked the leading innovation cluster globally in WIPO’s Innovation Cluster Ranking 2025, based on indicators such as patents, research publications, and venture capital activity. The GBA pairs world-class research with exceptional manufacturing capacity. Universities including The University of Hong Kong, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and Sun Yat-sen University, joined by ambitious newcomers such as SUSTech, sit within an industrial ecosystem whose companies, Huawei, Tencent, BYD, and DJI among them, shape technology markets worldwide. Ideas move from laboratory to prototype to production at a speed few regions can match. The GBA is nonetheless a heterogeneous, region rather than a single integrated system, and understanding how its parts fit together is essential to engaging with it effectively. Dr Erik Forsberg, author of the report and STINT Representative in China and ASEAN, presents important insights on the cluster in the video.
Swedish engagement with the region remains modest relative to its scale and scientific capacity. Deepening that engagement is clearly strategic, and understanding how the GBA works is a precondition for building durable partnerships with its universities, research institutes, and companies. This is the third report in a series on global science and innovation clusters, which also includes Boston–Cambridge and Tokyo-Yokohama. This report is aimed at researchers, research funders, and anyone interested in the region.
