Premier Li Keqiang mentioned "innovation in all aspects" twice in the 2015 Report on the Work of the Government, which happens to match the 'maker' spirit proposed by Haier years ago.

Zhou Yunjie, rotating president of Haier and deputy to the National People's Congress (NPC).[Photo/China.org.cn by He Shan]

"The task of Haier is to foster more and more makers," said Zhou Yunjie, rotating president of Haier and deputy to the National People's Congress (NPC), in an interview of China.org.cn. He believes Haier is transforming into an open platform for global makers and beginning to produce makers instead of goods.

Haier the maker

'Maker' refers to those who bring creative ideas into reality out of their interest and the term has been widely accepted since Maker: New Industrial Revolution was published.

Motivated by the slogan "everyone is a maker", Haier indicates the direction of revolution in the manufacturing industry and promotes the national strategy of innovation.

Zhou said that the Haier maker platform is divided into investment promotion and customer payment, the former attracting the best makers and resources and sharing promising projects with other corporations and managers while the latter connects makers with customers and allows customers to evaluate the performance of makers by means of the Internet. In this way, a win-win situation can be achieved.

For example, he said, the game Thor, designed by three young staff members, has ranked number two among others within two years, mainly due to the participation of customers and risk investment along with good reputation and resources.

There are three parts to the maker platform: Hope, the Returnees Entrepreneurial Association and Ocean Cube. Customers can access resources and designers directly through Hope, and a project can get financial support from the Returnees Entrepreneurial Association once it is formulated. At the same time, makers can share their experience and ideas with others in the Ocean Cube online community.

"More than 1000 projects are proposed on the maker platform annually and whether they will be carried out depends on the market and customers", said Zhou, "we not only provide an open and free platform but also resources and risk investment to promising projects."

Grand Ecological System: Internet+

Internet+, first proposed in the report by Premier Li, indicates the integration of the online and offline worlds. Zhou believes that Internet+ is a grand ecological system encompassing Big Data and the Internet of Things (IOT) and Haier is keeping pace with the age of Internet by developing LAN.

"Premier Li was farsighted enough to put forward Internet+ which looks forward to products that are 'created in China' rather than 'made in China'," said Zhou, "and it is in common with the Haier's idea. We are planning to establish an open ecological system of the Internet by combining customers' demands with intelligent manufacturing, factories with families, production with data, and the cloud with terminals."

Self-owned brand plus intelligent factory

Many factories have been transferring back from other Asian countries to China. Zhou sees this as a great challenge and points out that Chinese manufacturing should be transferred to Southeast Asia, Europe and America.

"However, China is facing two major problems. The first is a lack of self-owned brands. Chinese manufacturers always choose low cost and high efficiency brands, and don't have their own initiative; therefore it is of great importance to develop our own brands. The second problem is the high cost and low efficiency of Chinese manufacturing compared with European and American manufacturers. They manage to achieve greater output with fewer inputs by steadily improving technologies. Therefore, we have to explore intelligent factories, which are what Haier is concentrating on right now, and pursue automated, intelligent and unmanned management in manufacturing. I firmly believe intelligent factories will be the future of Chinese manufacturing," said Zhou.