When Philipp Böing sat in Beijing in 2010 and analyzed patent papers, few people were interested in Chinese innovation funding. The research community did not concern itself with the matter, and he had to search for the data painstakingly. „I can remember spending days in the copy room of the National Bureau of Statistics, trying to gather the figures from the yearbooks.“ But for his master’s thesis, Philipp Boeing was determined to find out how much innovation potential existed in this country, which 15 years earlier had still been a planned economy. His conclusion at the time: There is clearly room for improvement.