Evolving STP/Incubator Roles in the City of Nanjing Experimental Pioneer in facilitating the sustainable industry-university linkages

China's 12th Five-Year Plan, 2011 - 2015, aims to restructure the Chinese economy by encouraging domestic consumption, developing the service sector, shifting to higher value-added manufacturing, conserving energy, and cleaning up the environment. This implies the economy growth structure has to shift from attracting investment to center on production infrastructure and export-led to "focusing on the establishment of research and development infrastructure to revitalize innovation". This paper argues that strengthening the university-industry linkages and developing inter-firm learning capacity are the two key ingredients to achieve the successful transformation and thus using the Global Institute for innovation and entrepreneurship as an experimental laboratory to pioneering the approaches in fostering regional environment suitable for building up the two key capabilities.