A Sino-European Innovation Center has been launched in Milan during the Salone del Mobile, the ongoing furniture fair which runs from April 8 to 13. "We have planted a seed today that will make cross-cultural trees grow high in the future," Yao Yingjia, vice president and chief designer of Lenovo, which created the project along with China Red Star Design Award and Beijing Design Week, said at the opening ceremony. "This will be a platform to make a series of things useful for our lives, societies and development. For example, the center will foster cultural and artistic exchange, cooperation in scientific innovation and common investment growth," Yao told Xinhua. "We believe in the creative efforts of different peoples of the world and this is why we have opened this center," the artistic director of the project, Armando Bruno, told Xinhua. Bruno, an interior design professor at Tongji University in Shanghai, said the Sino-European Innovation Center was already at work on a series of events for the coming months including forum, exhibitions, visits and match-making that will bring Europe closer to China in the creative industry. Supported by Chinese financial institutions, the center will also publish an annual creative industry investment guide, according to Bruno.