HBR: China’s New Innovation Advantage

2021/04/23 wwchu 中國經改模式

by Zak Dychtwald
From the Magazine (May–June 2021), Harvard Business Review
https://hbr.org/2021/05/chinas-new-innovation-advantage
Summary.
Long considered a global copycat, China is now home to many of the fastest start-ups to reach a $1 billion valuation globally. Whatever has propelled Chinese companies to the top, the metrics we use to evaluate innovation have missed it. The author argues that China today has a resource that no other country has: hundreds of millions of people who have lived through unprecedented amounts of change—and who, consequently, can adopt and adapt to innovations at a speed and scale unmatched anywhere else on earth. Those hyper-adaptive and hyper-adoptive consumers are what make China so globally competitive today. But competition with the Chinese should not be considered a zero-sum game. Foreign companies would do well to seek to learn from China’s newly powerful example.