Keeping BCI Fast, not Frenzied, with a Strong Innovation Ecosystem
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In a recent interview, Luo Qingming, an academician at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and president of Hainan University, said recent Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) progress has been driven by supportive policies and rising investment. But he warned against overheating: frontier innovation takes time, and breakthroughs rarely arrive overnight.
He stressed the need for a coordinated government-industry-university ecosystem: governments should strengthen ethics and regulation and help build real-world use cases; companies should lead integration and rapid iteration; universities should pool interdisciplinary strengths to tackle fundamental challenges.
Luo also cited Hainan University's tech-transfer policy: for technologies not involving national security, research teams may retain full ownership and disposal rights, and receive up to 95 percent of returns — reducing barriers to industry collaboration and speeding translation from lab to market.
He said a key benefit from the Hainan Free Trade Port is "secure and orderly data flow". He noted that his team's high-precision mouse brain atlas saw its impact limited when data sharing was difficult and peers couldn't easily access or reuse the dataset. With clearer rules for data circulation, he expects smoother sharing so scientists worldwide can see the data, use it, and build on it — while also tapping into international open datasets to boost collaboration.
Luo offered a simple yardstick for "new quality productive forces": is there a large enough market and real demand? Citing UN data, he noted that about 12 percent of the world's population lives with neurological or mental health conditions - pointing to major potential for BCI in rehabilitation, diagnosis and treatment, for both invasive and non-invasive approaches. But as markets don't build themselves, Luo stressed that innovation is the source, application scenarios must be refined over time, and because BCI directly involves people, ethics and regulation have to keep pace. In his view, like EVs, BCI may take a long runway - before a sudden takeoff. (China Daily)
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