The Yangtze River Industrial Economic Think Tank Offline Seminar (2ed session) was successfully held on August 27, 2017 at the Suzhou Jinke Hotel. The theme of this offline seminar is “Future China’s New Growth Driver and New Industries”. This issue shows the speech of Professor Zheng Jianghuai of Nanjing University.New trends in global value chain (GVC) research: (1) The ratio of average export domestic value added to total export value of countries participating in the division of labor in the global value chain shows a downward trend, while China shows an upward trend; (2) multinational companies begin to gradually transfer R&D links to other countries; (3) From the perspective of cross-regional investment inflows, Asia has more connections with Europe than with the United States; (4) North America is the main source of innovation activities, and Asia will become the destination of the shift from the global value chain to the global innovation chain; (5) The manufacturing industry absorbs more innovative activities of multinational companies than the primary industry and service industries; (6) RDDT investment mainly occurs in global cities, and more and more international R&D transfers to Asian global cities; (7) Multinational RDDT investment not only comes from large enterprises, but also from small enterprises and newly internationalized enterprises.Factors affecting the innovation activities of multinational companies include: the improvement of local universities’ research capabilities, the level of local companies, the level of corporate tax rates, and R&D financial subsidies.The new trend of global value chain development gives us inspiration: China’s science and education innovation resources still have a lot of room for development in attracting global industrial innovation activities; China’s innovation and development needs to strengthen the communication between universities and scientific research institutions in different regions.
