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In response to the Hong Kong Chief Executive’s 2025 Policy Address, which proposed several initiatives to promote Hong Kong's offshore renminbi (RMB) market, Prof. Joseph Chan, Associate Director of the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at HKU Business School, offered his recommendations on financial development in a recent interview with the iCable News' segment, "Money and Wisdom."

We have been listening to discussions about Labubu’s innovative marketing and customer engagement, given its global success today. However, how can it shed light on Hong Kong’s RWA economy?

Companies need to understand the currently observable technologies and consider whether to apply these technologies directly or to conduct further research and development. Second, the application of design thinking is crucial, as it helps businesses achieve cross-disciplinary innovation and conduct diverse experiments based on market insights. Third, the management culture and internal management models of companies are also very important, as these factors can facilitate the advancement of innovation projects.

Hong Kong has long recorded successful performance in its four pillar industries, comprising trading and logistics, financial services, professional and producer services, and tourism. According to research by the Hong Kong SAR Government, they contributed close to 60% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and almost half of the total employment before COVID 19. However, all four of these pillars have experienced a decline in their respective areas as a result of the rapid changes in market needs and user behaviour, regional and global competition, the development of new value chains, the impact of advanced technologies, and changes in the geopolitical environment. To address such challenges, “innovation” has been introduced to tackle these pain-points of Hong Kong. The question is how we should develop innovation strategies instead of coming up with ideas just for the sake of “innovation”. This article will discuss how innovation strategy can be approached from the perspective of poverty alleviation and how the Web3 industry may develop―both topics likely to shed light on how best to chart Hong Kong’s future course of development.

Over the past decade, two technologies have been at the forefront of the digital revolution. The first is AI, which has seen global adoption, while the latter is the more contentious Web3, a decentralized blockchain protocol. This article will primarily focus on the latter.