Shanda Innovations Launches International Startup Competition

InnovationWorks is not the only Chinese incubator with innovation in its name. Shanda Innovations is a growing incubator based in Shanghai with a smaller office in Beijing, with about 500 ‘incubatees’.

Shanda Innovations has just announced a competition for startups, “Interactions on a Digital Frontier.” The competition calls for “web, mobile developers, programmers, hardware gurus, multimedia professionals, graphic designers to submit prototypes and/or concept designs.”

The best part? No need for a biz plan–just plan to build something cool. The winner walks away with $15,000, which is pretty cool regardless of what Sean Parker/Justin Timberlake says.

A few tips: there are actually two contests, one for China (交互改变生活) and one for international. Shanda seems especially keen on Android apps, where it, like InnovationWorks, is betting big. Applications are due July 31st.

I recently had a chance to visit the Shanghai office and was impressed by some truly inspired creativity. The geeks there were working on everything from designing board games (I’m personally a big fan) to allowing a user to control a small robot with his own physical movements (detected by a Kinect sensor). The teams tend to keep a low profile, so I’ve seen little in Chinese about it and nary a word in English.

In addition to a “pro-Innovation” stance (and really, who doesn’t claim to be?), Shanda Innovations is actually anti-copying: “Be smart, do the right thing. Don’t copy. You keep your own copyright, we’re interested in investing in bright and creative people.” That’s a standard I intend to hold them to. None of the startups I saw there seemed like clones, a good start.

Shanda Interactive (NASDAQ: SNDA) is known for its MMORPG gaming (which is still its cash cow subsidiary Shanda Games (NASDAQ: GAME)), but actually runs an empire that extends much further. It’s also big in e-books (Cloudary), video (Ku6), and is trying to push into social games and mobile.

And now it’s trying to make its mark with Shanda Innovations.