Dr. Laperrouza

Dr. Marc Laperrouza is a lecturer and researcher at EPFL (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne), who has been engaged in innovation development with and in China for many years. He studied in Fudan University, Shanghai 20 years ago. Now Dr. Laperrouza is working on the project China Hardware Innovation Camp (CHIC) - designed in Switzerland and manufactured in China. During our visit at EPFL, he introduced this project and provided some views on the innovation development of China.

Initiated by Pascal Marmier, Director of Swissnex China, CHIC is basically to go from idea to proptype in 30 days. At the beginning, students are put into a room with a number of tools and pushed to come up with some ideas. And 30 working days afterwards they should have a functional proptype. Teachers help students to develop a connected device with using open source hardware, software and sourcing components from Seedstudio.

CHIC 2016 on and off campus: Ideas → Semester projects → Projects & Visits

During students' stay in China, they will spend 2/3 of time in working on projects in Shenzhen or Hong Kong and 1/3 of time in visiting some Chinese companies like Huawei and makerspaces like Chaihuo, where they will exchange with makers, students and workers.

Interdisciplinary is regarded as one of the keywords of the project. The teammates come from different majors such as mechanics, software and design; Dr. Laperrouza hopes to maximize the interaction among them and they will learn from each other.

It is worth mentioning that every engineering student at EPFL takes 2 hours in learning social and human sciences every week in a wide range of areas like music, history and philosophy.

"For many students here, China is basically a place for cheap labor, that's their first idea", Dr. Laperrouza said, "our job is to tell them yes it is, but more interesting aspects of China are industrial designers, fast-developed companies...this is the change you should be looking at if your want to understand China tomorrow".

China 《Dimension》is present through multiple course offerings in Bachelor (BA) and Master (MA) levels at EPFL. Students need to know more about China, said the lecturer.

When speaking of the current situation of innovation and technology in China, Dr. Laperrouza noted that a number of Chinese companies have understood that imitation is no longer the way to go and they need to produce intellectual property, "like Huawei, it has invested 4G and now 5G..."

"China is improving quickly but the implementation of the intellectual property framework is very important", said Dr. Laperrouza.