Ningbo, Zhejiang and Nanjing, Jiangsu | 8 to 11 September 2026
eThesis will take part in the 2026 China-CEEC Conference on Innovation Cooperation, held from 8 to 11 September in Ningbo, Zhejiang Province and Nanjing, Jiangsu Province. We present on the afternoon of Wednesday 9 September in Ningbo.
This year the Conference marks its tenth anniversary. Jointly organised by the Ministry of Science and Technology of the People's Republic of China and the Ministry of Economy of the Slovak Republic, under the theme "A Decade of Innovation, Building the Future Together", it has become the flagship science and technology event within the China-CEEC cooperation framework. Over ten linked events will take place across the four days, including the Ministerial Meeting, thematic forums on artificial intelligence, robotics, biotechnology and green energy, a think tank roundtable, and an industry-university-research cooperation matchmaking meeting in Nanjing.
We are attending to contribute to one specific part of that agenda: how academic research and industry actually find each other, and what infrastructure is missing between them.
The problem we want to put on the table
Universities are among the most productive research institutions in any economy, and the thesis is their most frequent research output. Every year, across Europe and across China, students complete undergraduate, master and doctoral theses that represent months of supervised work on real problems.
Very little of that work travels. A thesis is typically read by a supervisor and an examination committee, filed in an institutional repository, and then effectively disappears. The research is done. The connection is not made.
The problem runs in the other direction as well. Companies hold applied research questions that are the right size and the right difficulty for a supervised thesis. They rarely have a route to a professor who could take one on. Where informal routes exist, they depend on personal contacts, and they break down entirely across borders and languages.
A third gap sits underneath both. When a student finishes a project with real technical skills, there is no reliable way for an employer in another country to confirm what those skills are. A diploma states that a degree was awarded. It says almost nothing about what the graduate can do. Across a border, that verification problem becomes an outright barrier to mobility and to hiring.
None of this is a paperwork problem. It is missing infrastructure.
Three ideas we bring to the Conference
The thesis is an underused research asset, and digitising its lifecycle is the first step to changing that.
If the full lifecycle of a thesis is handled in a shared digital environment, from topic discovery and supervisor matching through milestone tracking, examination and repository publication, then the institution gains something it did not have before: a structured, searchable, up to date picture of the research capacity inside its own walls. That picture is the precondition for everything else. You cannot connect industry to academic research if the research itself is only visible as unstructured PDFs after the fact.
Industry needs a structured way in, and the academic institution has to stay in control of it.
Our proposal is deliberately narrow. A company submits a structured research brief. An academic reviews it and decides whether to convert it into a supervised thesis topic. If they do, the intellectual property terms are fixed at that moment from a small set of clear options, ranging from fully open publication to confidential sponsored work. The company never holds an account inside the academic system. It never queries student records, drafts or grades. It receives only what the institution chooses to publish outward.
This constraint is not a limitation we tolerated. It is the design. University-industry collaboration fails when institutions feel they are losing control of their students, their data or their research. Build the boundary into the architecture and the collaboration becomes something a university can actually approve.
Cross-border cooperation needs credentials that verify themselves.
Skills acquired during a supervised thesis should be attestable by the supervisor and verifiable by anyone, anywhere, without contacting the issuing institution. This is now technically achievable using open standards for verifiable credentials, combined with shared skills taxonomies so that a skill named in Athens means the same thing when read in Ningbo.
The point is broader than employment. Trust between two innovation systems cannot rest only on agreements between ministries. At the level where researchers, students and companies actually meet, it has to be technical.
Why this matters in the China-CEEC context
Ten years of China-CEEC cooperation have built the institutional layer: agreements, technology transfer centres, matchmaking events, and a growing network of relationships. What we would like to discuss in Ningbo is the layer below that. What tooling would let a professor in Slovakia and a company in Jiangsu find each other without a conference in between? What would make a Greek graduate's project work legible to a Chinese employer, and the reverse?
These are not questions any single company answers alone. They are exactly the kind of question a decade-old cooperation framework is well placed to take on.
What we bring, and what we hope to take away
These ideas are not theoretical for us. eThesis has been building and running this infrastructure since 2020, and the platform is live with institutions in Greece and the Netherlands. We are testing against real academic workflows, real institutional procurement, and real data protection requirements under the GDPR.
We are travelling to Ningbo and Nanjing to put these ideas in front of people who have spent a decade on the same problem from the other direction. If you work on university-industry collaboration, technology transfer or skills recognition and you will be at the Conference, we would like to meet.
Contact: info@ethesisplatform.com
Efthymios Tsatsaris Founder and CEO, eThesis P.C.
