The first JD Cup Smart Hardware Challenge came to an end. What will change if we stand on the "shoulders of giants"?

On August 20, after nearly three months, the first JD Cup Smart Hardware Innovation and Entrepreneurship Challenge came to an end on the Chinese Valentine's Day in 2015.

A total of 1,123 teams, covering 85 colleges and universities across the country, from the first batch of 100 projects preliminary selection to the next 20 projects entering the semi-finals, finally, the Feitian UAV team from Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics won the gold medal of this competition.

In today's wave of national entrepreneurship, smart hardware is undoubtedly a very hot field. Due to the special status of college students, smart hardware entrepreneurial projects from university campuses are also particularly noteworthy. This time, JD.com is associated with the college students' smart hardware innovation in the form of an entrepreneurial competition. The more important significance lies in that with the "giant's shoulders" of JD.com, smart hardware projects initiated and participated by college students have an effective way to move from campus to market.

Six capabilities to improve campus smart hardware projects

The general impression given by college students' entrepreneurship is that they are creative and have ideas, and some even have the conditions to form a preliminary startup company. However, just like the gap between campus and society, most entrepreneurial projects find it difficult to connect with the actual market. Especially for the smart hardware industry, the incompleteness of funding, supply chain, R&D and production and sales platforms will hinder the final implementation of excellent products.

In this regard, JD Intelligence, in conjunction with its JD+ incubator, will provide six capabilities to help smart hardware projects started on campus to incubate, grow, and enter the market.

First of all, the investment incubation capabilities provided by JD Intelligence will solve basic needs for entrepreneurs such as funding and office space, while the industrial design capabilities can integrate resources from all parties to make the product's appearance achieve the best effect that the manufacturer ideally desires and meet market demand.

In terms of the supply chain, JD Intelligence will integrate resources from the entire industry chain for innovative smart hardware, and rely on the marketing capabilities of the JD platform to amplify the influence of products through user access traffic.

More importantly, in the era of the Internet of Everything, a single smart hardware product will inevitably fail to reflect the maximum value of intelligence. JD Intelligence uses the interconnection capabilities brought by the Super APP Microlink. As long as the product is developed through access to JD's protocols, APIs and STCs, it can communicate with products of other types of uses. In addition, the cloud and big data capabilities behind it can further help entrepreneurs reduce the later R&D and maintenance costs of the product.

Liu Zihao, CTO of JD Intelligent Group, also emphasized that each team and each product is at a different stage and requires different resources, including different team intentions. JD will not set a time point to force the entrepreneurial team to achieve a certain goal. There is no preset time limit or funding limit on how far to go towards this product. What JD needs to do is to cooperate with the team, turn the prototype into a product, and provide full-range capability support.

For the winners of this competition, the end of the Smart Hardware Challenge is just the beginning of the road from ideas to mature products for smart hardware. Like all entrepreneurial roads, this road is full of various "pitfalls". The emergence of JD.com, the "shoulders of giants", is to help entrepreneurs fill the "pitfalls".

JD.com and entrepreneurs will eventually achieve a win-win situation in the field of intelligence

As a household e-commerce brand, JD.com had more than 96.6 million active users and 689 million orders by the end of 2014. There are nearly 1,000 smart hardware brands on sale on JD.com, and 95% of famous domestic and foreign brands choose to debut on JD.com. From September 2013 to date, the growth rate of smart hardware categories has reached 80%. It can be said that JD.com is building a smart hardware ecosystem with the help of JD.com Intelligence, and JD.com itself is also leading the smart hardware market.

JD.com connects consumers, which is what a product needs to enter the market. When facing entrepreneurs, it can also help products develop better at the product and industrial chain levels, which is exactly what smart hardware startup teams need.

From another perspective, for JD.com, which is building an intelligent ecosystem step by step, incorporating more different types of products is also a need for JD.com's own intelligent development.

Just looking at the projects that have reached the final stage of this smart hardware entrepreneurship competition, they mainly cover six popular directions including smart sports, drones, Internet of Vehicles, wearable devices, smart homes and industry.

Just as a startup team needs to establish connections between its products and other types of products at the beginning, the ecosystem created by JD.com also requires different products to be interconnected and connected within the ecosystem to form a truly ecological usage scenario.

Innovation is an important part of JD.com’s corporate culture. Taking smart hardware as the foothold and exploring the future intelligent era together with entrepreneurs is JD.com’s choice to practice innovation.

As Liu Yanguang, head of JD Campus, said, JD has a platform, powerful technology, and strong ability to integrate the entire industry chain, but what it lacks and desires now are excellent creativity and products, which is also the original intention of holding the JD Cup Smart Hardware Challenge.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.