Industrial Technology Research Institute

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Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) is a not‑for‑profit technology research center in Taiwan. It was founded on July 5, 1973, and is based in Hsinchu with offices in the US, Europe and Japan. It has more than 6,000 employees. The chairman is Wu Tsung‑tsong and the president is Edwin Liu.

ITRI has played a key role in moving Taiwan from a labor‑intensive economy to an innovation‑driven one. Its open labs and startup programs helped grow new industries and companies, including UMC and TSMC.

In 2020, ITRI launched the 2030 Technology Strategy & Roadmap to guide technology development for industry and society, working with partners in academia, industry and the government.

Milestones include the establishment of the Materials Research Laboratories (MRL) in 1982, with Otto C.C. Lin as founding director. In 2002, ITRI partnered with Apex Medical to develop respiratory therapy products. In 2019, ITRI banned Huawei smartphones and laptops from its internal network for security reasons, a move criticized by China’s Taiwan Affairs Office.

In summer 2025, ITRI stopped participating in the Taiwan Space Agency’s 5G LEO satellite project, realizing satellites were outside its core expertise; private firms took over. By 2019, ITRI’s self‑driving car projects had logged more than 2,000 kilometers of testing in the Changhua Coastal Industrial Park.

StarFab is ITRI’s tech accelerator, focusing on smart manufacturing, smart medical care, smart finance and smart agriculture. It is based in Taipei with an office in the Tainan Science Park.