What enlightenment does The Outlook | the path of entrepreneurship under the epidemic?

"The road to entrepreneurship is full of thorns, not only a brainstorm, but also a contest of will and spirit."

"We just started to have a turnover last year, and the agricultural sector is slow to make money, and we may never make a lot of money, but it makes us feel particularly down-to-earth and valuable."

Wen | Zhao Wanwei, Yang Siqi, reporter of the "Lookout" news weekly

Affected by the epidemic and other factors, the situation of employment and entrepreneurship of college graduates is severe and complex. Some young people's enthusiasm for entrepreneurship has not subsided due to the epidemic. Aiming at the national strategic needs, they germinate and grow in their respective areas of expertise, and constantly look for new opportunities.

With the support of the national encouragement policy and the incubation system for college students around the world, they have embarked on the road of entrepreneurship without hesitation, trekked hard, and gradually became a new star in the industry.

"The road to entrepreneurship is a contest of will and spirit"

"In 2020, due to the impact of the epidemic, the domestic data service supply chain was interrupted. We undertook an English voice transcription project from Baidu and completed it brilliantly by moving to Bangalore, India. Later, our international business was hampered by the epidemic, and we used the advantages of overseas supply chains to open up domestic markets. Zhong Ping, founder of The Iceberg Data Team, said that the ability to have this flexible delivery solution at home and abroad benefits from the team's global strategic layout of the company's business at the beginning of its inception.

Zhong Ping was born in Hong Kong in 1995 and came to Beijing with his parents in middle school. During his university studies, he felt the strong entrepreneurial atmosphere in Beijing and the policy environment that encouraged innovation.

After graduating from beijing fashion institute in 2017, Zhong Ping became a member of the Beijing Internet "big factory", participating in the big data infrastructure platform business of autonomous driving and speech recognition at Baidu, and came into contact with the data industry.

Founded in 2019, the company provides data development and data services for the market, focusing on data processing in scenarios such as text, voice, and autonomous driving paths. The main service objects are domestic AI companies and laboratories of some scientific research universities, etc., providing various data pre-processing services. Zhong Ping said.

The company's first business is still fresh in his memory. "At that time, there was a customer who needed to do data annotation in Hindi, and the past practice was to find domestic Indian students or ask professional translators to translate manually." Zhong Ping said that we found suppliers in India, trained local personnel by providing data labeling solutions, and completed the task in three months, with a project flow of more than 400,000 yuan.

Data is the "blood" of the era of artificial intelligence, and the data labeling industry is to make the "blood" flow better and faster. The "pain point" of the data labeling industry is that it is difficult to be accurate and refined due to the cumbersome and complex process. After a large number of data searches and many experimental tests by the team, in 2020, the company developed a solution. Through the AI algorithm embedded in the data production tool, the productivity of individual workers is greatly improved, the original complex process is simplified, and the efficiency and accuracy are improved.

The company's further development has benefited from various innovation and entrepreneurship competitions in Beijing universities, which were still held normally even during the epidemic. In 2021, Zhong Ping's team participated in the selection of outstanding entrepreneurial teams of college students in Beijing and won the first prize. The reward of this competition is to get the qualification to enter the Beijing University Students Entrepreneurship Park (Polytechnic Park), not only can use the office space for 2 years free of charge, but also enjoy the whole process of business incubation services such as policy consultation, business registration, legal services, investment and financing docking.

This has driven the expansion of the company's business. "At present, we have more than 50 overseas multilingual data providers, which can provide customers with multilingual native language annotations." Cui Tengfei, who is in charge of overseas project operations, said. Born in 1999, Cui Tengfei is the youngest partner of the company.

Since 2021, due to the impact of the epidemic, the company's business has shifted to China, and on the basis of data labeling in small languages, it has developed an autonomous driving business in the domestic market. So far, the company's data system has been extended to the fields of finance, medical treatment, etc., and has established business contacts with large enterprises such as Baidu and Tencent, with 200 annotators at home and abroad, and thousands of long-term data executives.

As a start-up company established for 3 years, it is still experiencing market baptism and withstanding the test of the epidemic, but Zhong Ping said that there are many trainings, challenges, and opportunities, "The road to entrepreneurship is full of thorns, not only a brainstorming, but also a competition of will and spirit."

"Using the power of science and technology to make people's lives better"

"During the epidemic period, we took the initiative to learn relevant operations and professional knowledge, actively undertook the work of sanitize the epidemic, and obtained the Grade A qualification of hospital disinfection and maintenance service enterprise and the Grade A qualification of epidemic prevention and disinfection service enterprise." Nowadays, the company has been successfully selected as a technology-based small and medium-sized enterprise, and is also organizing the declaration of high-tech enterprises. Chi Muzi, general manager of Harbin Wushan Qing Environmental Protection Technology Co., Ltd., said.

Chi Muzi, born in 2001, is a senior student in the School of Economics and Management of Harbin Institute of Technology, and has now obtained the qualification of directly pursuing doctoral studies without exams, and will pursue a doctoral degree in management. In the four years of university life, Chi Muzi's growth steps have always been closely related to entrepreneurship.

Chi Muzi's family is in Daqing City, Heilongjiang Province, his parents have been in poor health, and he has worked part-time to supplement the family since middle school. After going to college, he traveled to and from Harbin and Daqing every week, working part-time to support a family.

In September 2018, HIT opened an innovation and entrepreneurship course for first-year students, and Chi Muzi, who had just entered the university, and his classmates visited the HIT University Students' Innovation and Entrepreneurship Park together. The wonderful entrepreneurial stories, rich entrepreneurial achievements, and years of part-time work experience here inspired him to start a business.

Introduced by friends, Chi Muzi became acquainted with the "post-85s" zhan Dafu who was engaged in the water purification industry. At that time, Zhan Dafu's son was plagued by home decoration pollution and was always allergic. Chi Muzi saw a business opportunity. He and Zhan Dafu hit it off and devoted himself to the air pollution control industry.

At the beginning, they purchased a variety of pharmaceutical products from the market, including many imported products, combined different decoration materials in the laboratory to test the performance, and then provided treatment suggestions according to different decoration environments and pollutant excess indexes, and explored corresponding treatment methods.

In March 2019, they registered the company with the support of Daqing University Student Entrepreneurship Incubation Service Center, and in October of the same year, they registered a branch in Suihua City, and the related products were effectively tested in the market, which initially proved the feasibility of entrepreneurial ideas, and reached a preliminary cooperation intention with a number of commercial investment companies and real estate enterprises.

With the development of business and the expansion of the company's scale, Chi Muzi and team members realized that they should form products with independent intellectual property rights as soon as possible, and they tried to create an air purifier that can absorb indoor air and display in real time whether the concentration of various pollutants exceeds the standard, and is movable and moderately priced through independent research and development. The team named this research and development project "5G Smart Space Indoor Air Monitoring and Governance Robot".

In various innovation and entrepreneurship competitions, Chi Muzi met Yu Zhenjiang, a doctoral student in the School of Chemical Engineering, and Tang Xu, a doctoral student in the School of Astronautics, and his entrepreneurial ideas stimulated the interest of these two seniors. Giving full play to his professional strengths, Yu Zhenjiang took the lead in the research and development of equipment treatment agents and electrochemical detection devices, and Tang Xu took the lead in the structural design of the equipment and the automation and intelligent technology. In 2020, their project was supported by the HIT University Students Innovation and Entrepreneurship Park, stationed in the park for incubation, and was selected into the national university students innovation and entrepreneurship training program at the same time.

In September 2020, the team began to take shape and registered a company in Harbin. Over the past few years, the team has accumulated more than 20 intellectual property rights, and the products have been sold to Harbin, Daqing, Suihua, Hegang, Changchun, Chengdu, Xishuangbanna, Haikou and other places, and more than 200 people have been employed.

Today, the office of Chimu's subsidiary is lined with rows of different packages of removers, which are the result of the team's wisdom. When sharing his entrepreneurial experience with his students, he appeared to explain the opportunities and significance of the era of innovation and entrepreneurship of college students. In addition to starting a business, Chi Muzi also relied on the HIT Graduate Student Support Group to fund students with family economic difficulties in the areas where they supported the teaching; set up the Wushan Youth Management Fund to reward outstanding students who took root in the grassroots and students with family economic difficulties who were unremittingly self-reliant...

In Chi Muzi's view, struggle is the constant pursuit of youth. In the future, he will continue to be down-to-earth, starting from actual needs, growing wisdom and talent in innovation and entrepreneurship, and using the power of science and technology to make people's lives better.

On July 14, 2020, Wang Xuekai (first from the right) instructed local farmers and herdsmen to carry out cultivation management and silage processing experiments on woody feed trees, demonstration and promotion technology

"The country needs good grass, then I will do a good job"

"This year, even if our sales staff have been trapped at home because of the epidemic, there are still orders coming in." Wang Xuekai and Xu Jingjing, co-founders of China Youth Yicao and the forage processing team of China Agricultural University, said: "We just started to have a turnover last year, and the agricultural field is slow to make money, and we may never make big money, but it makes us feel particularly down-to-earth and valuable." ”

Wang Xuekai, born in 1993, belongs to "passive entrepreneurship". As a farmer, he was not very interested in business at first, but his experience of participating in college student innovation and entrepreneurship competitions for many times pushed him step by step to the road of establishing a company and promoting silage microbial starters.

Wang Xuekai was born in Jiaozuo, Henan Province, to a dual-career family and came into contact with agriculture after going to college. "When I was in junior high school, I saw the melamine incident on the news, and it touched me a lot at that time. To develop animal husbandry, the country needs good grass, so I must do a good job of grass. ”

During the college entrance examination, Wang Xuekai chose pragmatology science. With the deepening of learning, Wang Xuekai feels more and more that this profession is valuable and meaningful. In 2015, the No. 1 document of the Central Committee proposed to further promote the adjustment of agricultural structure and support the planting of silage forage, which made him feel very excited. After graduating from undergraduate, he applied for China Agricultural University, where he studied for a master's and doctoral degree under Professor Yang Fuyu and deeply cultivated the industry.

The first prize of the 2020 Beijing University Students Outstanding Entrepreneurial Team Selection, the First National Postdoctoral Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition National Finals Winner Award, the Second Prize of the 6th China International "Internet +" College Students Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition in Beijing... A series of honors not only made him more confident in the silage processing of the forage industry, but also made him truly on the road of promoting the transformation of scientific research achievements with innovation and entrepreneurship.

In May 2020, he and xu Jingjing, an alumnus of China Agricultural University, launched the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Team of China Youth Yicao, the core members of which are composed of master's and doctoral degrees in the forage processing team of China Agricultural University, with 75% of doctoral degrees and more than 60% of the team members having overseas research and exchange experience. Under the guidance and incubation of Beijing University Students Entrepreneurship Park (Polytechnic Park), Employment and Entrepreneurship Office of China Agricultural University, Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center of College of Pratacultural Science and Technology, and Science and Technology Park of National University of China Agricultural University, they entered the forage industry with the research and development and sales of silage microbial starter as the entry point, and at the same time provided menu-based standardized production technology services for the whole silage industry chain.

Silage – Perhaps unfamiliar with agriculture, Wang Xuekai said, in simple terms, without forage processing technology, livestock can only eat grass in season. The silage technology keeps the forage tender and juicy through microbial anaerobic fermentation, which solves the spatio-temporal contradiction of forage production and use. Allowing livestock to eat green forage all year round can achieve the effect of improving production performance and improving the quality of meat and milk products.

Silage technology can also make woody feed such as trees and mulberry trees, agricultural by-products such as straw and sugarcane tail leaves, fruit trees, and ecological forest stubble branches become forage feed, so as to achieve the purpose of expanding the source of forage resources.

"Our team has developed silage agents that can help make the fermentation process more efficient and nutrient retention better." He said that the business cycle in the agricultural sector is closely related to the production season. The first batch of goods was sold in June 2021, covering more than ten provinces in the second half of the year, and sales are expected to increase more than 2 times this year. We feel that there is a lot of potential behind us, even if our sales leaders are stuck at home because of the epidemic, there are still orders coming in.

The main product of Zhongqing Yicao is now silage starter - Yiqing No. 1, No. 2, No. 3, etc., which is used to prepare and process silage. The core technology of these products is derived from the research results of the forage team of China Agricultural University over the years, and is authorized to the student innovation and entrepreneurship team for application transformation and demonstration promotion under the support of the school's scientific and technological achievement transformation policy.

"About 20 years ago, the silage starters available to farmers and herdsmen on the mainland were mainly foreign products, and their core microorganisms had good adaptability to the main local forage types and fermentation conditions in foreign countries, but they were not fully suitable for the diversified forage supply system and production environment of the mainland, resulting in high application costs and uneven fermentation effects." Wang Xuekai said that our original intention is to provide more, better and more suitable localization options for Chinese forage, improve the quality of silage and reduce production costs. At present, Yiqing series products are mainly divided into grass forage, leguminous forage, woody feed and other categories, and at the same time, special starter cultures and supporting application technologies suitable for the local natural conditions of grasslands have been developed, which are widely welcomed by the market. Yiqing series of fungal agents was successfully selected into the national "13th Five-Year Plan" scientific and technological innovation achievement exhibition in October 2021.

"According to the '14th Five-Year' National Forage Industry Development Plan, to ensure that beef, mutton and milk originate from the goal of feeding rate, the total demand for high-quality forage in the mainland will exceed 120 million tons, and there is still a gap of nearly 50 million tons. Wang Xuekai said, just like our slogan - Chinese youth, Chinese grass. I hope that more outstanding young people will join us in taking over the baton of grass industry innovation and development, shouldering the mission of rejuvenating agriculture through science and technology, and being down-to-earth and far-reaching on the road of serving rural revitalization. ■