BEIJING: Lenovo has affirmed its faith in innovation to drive future growth as the technology business unveiled new products and demonstrated breakthrough product concepts at Lenovo Tech World, the company's first global technology event.

"We're going to show the world that innovation still matters," chief executive Yang Yuanqing told the Financial Times.

"This is particularly important in China, where all the players are just focusing on the so-called new business model, to use the content and services to subsidise hardware," he added.

That approach, the FT noted, has seen smartphone maker Xiaomi valued at three times the market capitalisation of Lenovo despite having less than one third of its overall sales.

"We will tell the market and the world that this is not the only thing you should be focusing on," Yang declared. "We should still focus on innovation, we should still focus on technology."

Hardware improvements were naturally on display at the event but Lenovo and its partners, including Intel, Microsoft and Baidu, are also advancing user-centric software solutions, particularly in the areas of alternate input including voice, touchscreen technology and pen.

Lenovo also showed off several concept devices, which pointed to a sci-fi future. The 'Magic View' smartwatch, for example, gets around the problems of the device's small screen by using optical reflection to create a virtual image and allows users to see a virtual display more than 20 times larger than the watch face display.

And a 'Smart Cast' smartphone combines built-in laser projector, infrared motion detector and high-performance algorithms to transform the device into something more akin to a PC.

Users can project a large virtual touch screen onto a table to type with a virtual keyboard and work with specific productivity apps (calculator, drawing, note-taking and even edit in Microsoft PowerPoint).

A third, less obvious, concept was 'Smart Shoes', an Internet of Things product that can track and analyse fitness data including heart beats and caloric consumption while also providing maps and directions to places.

Data sourced from BusinessWire, Financial Times; additional content by Warc staff