> The common perception that China is incapable of innovation needs re-examining.
No one is saying Chinese people can't innovate. The real question is whether Chinese people can innovate while inside China. (I wonder what percentage of current captains of industry in China studied abroad?) Why? Because innovation is essentially disrupting and rebelling against the status quo. ie breaking rules, disobedience, opposition to the norm
When you demand that your people bow and obey, and imprison people like A1 WW, this goes against promoting and nurturing innovation
When your culture is very antagonistic towards people who don't like the status quo and forces them to carefully think about what they say and write, the culture itself becomes a big obstacle to innovation. When you run garbage likethe Great Firewall that limits the sharing of information, that's another strike against innovation. (Of course one way to mitigate the effects of authoritarian rule is by being really favorable towards immigration from places with the opposite culture.)
I guess Shenzen is a place that's figuratively where "the mountains are high and the emperor is far away". I wonder how long before that changes?
As a fellow Chinese who's been living in the West for a few years, I feel obligated to speak out against this:
Although I hold strong dissent against Chinese government in many aspects (in particular censorship, e.g. GFW), although I agree the traditional norm of Chinese culture and society does not commend rebellions, your argument is a slippery slope at its best. Essentially, you are exaggerating from both ends: a. going from political suppression and a humble (or even submissive, if you wish) culture to suppression on technical innovation; b. reading too much from the so-called SV culture and success stories, so much so to draw a strong equivalence between innovation and (social) disruption.
For (a), as many peer comments have already stated, there are many counterexamples. Japan has a much more submissive culture and Russia has similarly, if not more, suppressive political atmosphere. Innovations still happen in both places. And I also suggest you to read more history to see how many innovations were achieved in unwelcoming environment. Yes, these are obstacles and might affect the scale and success of innovations, but obstacles exist everywhere (if there were no opposition, rebellions even wouldn't be called "rebellions" in SV), and small (in the sense of domain, e.g. purely technical) innovations are still innovations, which leads to the second point--
For (b), "disruption" is really a buzz word loved by VC, and there is a trend of extending such buzz word to contexts we would not use this word originally, for example an invention in a particular domain is now a "disruption" in that domain, which makes a ripple sound like a tide. Fundamental, social disruptions can be significantly harder in China, but that does not prevent other innovations, or if you prefer, "disruptions", from happening.
In a nutshell, you are stretching these two ends to force them to meet:
the negative effect of political/cultural suppression --> impossible to innovate <-- the "disruptions" of innovations
And finally, pardon my language, your examples and references are utter nonsense. I know where you are trying to go from them, but they do not prove your point by any means.
China is not Russian style system where oligarchs close to leader step in and steal your stuff if you get rich.
China resembles (British) monarchy of the old. There are laws, but they are not same for the common man and to the noble (60 million members of the communist party). If you steer away from the politics, you can be entrepreneur and become rich.
Corruption exists of course, but that's like taxation. You pay your taxes and bribes. Bribing can sometimes allow more freedoms than completely lawful society, because it allows more.
China has basically the same bioethical laws as the west, but they are not enforced because party does not care. China became the first country to approve the commercial production of a gene therapy.
> When you demand that your people bow and obey, and imprison people like A1 WW, this goes against promoting and nurturing innovation
This is a common misconception, especially by people who have never lived in China.
Thinking political censorship means people are docile all spheres of life.
Chinese people are actually much more prone to rant and fight over everyday injustices: shopkeeper ripped you off, denied entrance somewhere, etc. etc. They just have to be careful not to publicly blame any politicians for the issue or try to organize some group activity to protest it.
Why do you think the government cracks down so hard? Because they're scared: massive and violent people rebellions have erupted throughout Chinese history.
Many Chinese people are also quite creative and innovative when it comes to making money and getting ahead. Some home cooks make deals with restaurants to let their patrons sample their homemade spices with their meals and to buy jars of it if they like it.
Others have started groups on Wechat where members pay to get advice on X topic (http://europe.chinadaily.com.cn/epaper/2015-11/13/content_22...). There are tons more examples like this. In fact, I'd argue it can be easier to get your idea started in China because regulations are lax and it's much easier to network to get what you need.
Also, just to point out, in the West, the majority of people aren't exactly "rebelling against the status quo" and showing "opposition to the norm" because they can march in a protest or sign a petition.
When you demand that your people bow and obey, and imprison people like A1 WW, this goes against promoting and nurturing innovation
Although the Japanese were not imprisoning people "like A1 WW", they were bowing and obeying when they ushered the era of consumer electronics a few decades ago. Now it's the turn of the Chinese.
Remember that innovations in tech do not require disrupting the government. The tech innovators have little interests in sabotaging the government. Innovations in tech is different from breaking government rules. Tech innovations are about disrupting the incumbents such as Microsoft, Amazon, Google, not about the government. Quite to the contrary, the Chinese government encourages tech innovations. Not only that they allow them to innovate, they allow them to break existing rules. As an instance, China is one of the few large countries which have legalized shared cars nation-wide(Didi, Uber). Not even the US.
I think that it's very possible that unrestricted political speech isn't needed for dynamic business environments. I feel like a lot of Americans are waiting for the other shoe to drop, but only use vague innuendo or metaphor to explain why free speech is necessary for the next electronics innovation.
Can't we just say we like free speech? Because if we dont, and they can develop new commercial products without it, China will likely never get free speech. They'll just hear about it as something Western companies wanted that China succeeded without.
Good lord, this is a ridiculous comment, its truly shameful that its most upvoted.
Before you call out Chinese government on Great Firewall, What about Patent Trolls? Or the upcoming Physical wall south of the border? Painting an entire culture with a broad brush is stupid.
>> The real question is whether Chinese people can innovate while inside China.
To decisively refute your argument. The current leading company in Drones, is DJI
The company was founded in 2006 by Frank Wang (Wāng Tāo, 汪滔). Who did not study Abroad.
Also they brought the most populous country in the world from extreme poverty to a near superpower status, and they managed to build home grown tech industry (Baidu, Didi) while intelligently keeping SV out. Is it ethical & moral that's a different question, is it innovative? You bet it is!
If the only innovation is some stupid IOT microwave made (with heart emoji) in Silicon Valley by hipsters supporting bernie then you are utterly deluded. The chinese government is filled with geniuses. Refusing to term the enormous progress achieved by the Chinese government (filled mostly with Chinese who studied in China) as innovation is antithetical.
First of all, it is a complex place. All big countries are.
Creating an original product/idea is different from innovating upon an existing one. So is Google not innovative as they did not invent internet search? ApplePay is less innovative because Alipay (handled USD660B in 2012) was started in 2004? Or Wechat is not innovative because whatsapp was there first?
I am not Chinese but we sell software in Asia. In a smaller box, they have to be more innovative because of all the crap rules they deal with like Great Firewall. Sure, many of the copies are of low quality and pitiful. However, similar to the hindi word - jugaad, everyday innovations are made using whatever is available. In many ways, they are more flexible than the Japanese who defer more to standard practices and hierarchy.
Eventually some made it better than the forerunners. Wechat started as a messaging app but has outstripped whatsapp in terms of applications. It is so tightly integrated in everyday activities, i.e people pay for their daily groceries, buy mcdonalds, it has voice messaging way before whatsapp introduced it, withdraw sent messages etc.
I feel that the culture is only antagonistic towards people who don't like the political status quo, not business. Didi (uber), DHL type of services are illegal at the beginning but gained legitimate status eventually because of its usefulness to the society. The propaganda is not helpful but I don't see it as any different from religious propaganda. If you can ignore it, you are fine. (Well, some people claimed religious people are less innovative, but that is another discussion)
One key factor is the way people act in groups are limited to basically one mode: master-slave. We don't have the environment to nuture other modes, which is crucial for innovation. Also avoiding people equipped with that ability is one of the fundamental work to make sure no group can emerge to do anything effective.
People move to new places to make money, and in turn elevate their status. Innovation is a means through which people gain an advantage to make money, and therefore gain more status. As Silicon Valley shows, it takes investment to make money.
China is flush with money. So your arguments, railing against China, fall flat; unless you are willing to ignore the basic tenets of Silicon Valley.
(People also make great technological strides when it comes to defense of their livelihoods. That is why so much public spending towards defense has lead to so many innovative technologies. But that is a topic for another conversation.)
> When your culture is very antagonistic towards people who don't like the status quo and forces them to carefully think about what they say and write, the culture itself becomes a big obstacle to innovation.
I am super inspired to go there... I have a product I want made, that I want to find out how much it would cost to make. It would be wonderful to go to Shenzen, but I found a place in Fremont CA that is a mfr of the component I need with offices in Shenzen. so trying to contact them.
I've been reading Bunny's "The Hardware Hacker" and it does make me want to visit.
What I find particularly fascinating is that it provides powerful evidence that 'open' is innovative and 'closed' is stifling.
Early on in the tech business everything was 'open'. The IBM PC published the source code to the BIOS in its technical manual, Intel and Motorola documented all of the options on their chips and how to program them, early programmable logic (PALs and PLDs) were easy to program with available documentation.
As a result lots of people built a wide variety of devices and systems using those parts, and that supported (in the Bay Area at least) dozens of circuit board houses, small run manufacturers, fastener companies, assembly houses, and parts distributors.
Starting with 3D accelerator chips, documentation became locked up behind NDA walls, access to small quantities was nearly impossible, and it became harder and harder to build something out of off the shelf parts. Designers and inventors were held back, their reduced demand for services put pressure on the rest of the ecosystem and the vibrant economy around building hardware crashed and burned. The biggest loss was perhaps the small boutique chip houses that made interesting parts with a bit of this and a bit of that.
Reading Bunny's book and the economist's article it seems that a combination of "Gongkai" and many different small factories has created this environment in Shenzen. That is a good thing and bodes well for the future growth of the area (assuming it isn't crushed by the powers that be). I'd love to figure out how to rekindle that here in the Bay Area.
I'm so impressed with Shenzen, but there's nothing shocking about it. I've been following China's rise up the value chain since the late 90's. It is steady, predictable, and inexorable. They're not done yet. If America doesn't get serious about invigorating it's high tech manufacturing ecosystem, so we have the talent and supply chain needed to stay competitive innovating in the world of atoms they way we do with bits, we're gonna have a bad time... if we aren't already. (Here's looking at you, GoPro)
> If America doesn't get serious about invigorating it's high tech manufacturing ecosystem, so we have the talent and supply chain needed to stay competitive innovating in the world of atoms they way we do with bits, we're gonna have a bad time... if we aren't already.
I'm convinced sufficiently that America has lost enough of that ecosystem and will continue the erosion trend enough for the foreseeable future that I'm giving serious consideration to physically moving closer to China if not establish physical residency there, a possibility that was unthinkable only 10 years ago. I don't think China will stop at atoms, and challenging US dominance in bits over the coming decades is no longer fanciful; maybe not in my generation, but perhaps my grandchildren's. The value-over-time delivered from "owning" an ecosystem was and is vastly underestimated by most US business leadership that is simplistically yield-chasing (focusing on ever-larger margins). Ownership in this context is the ability to iteratively turn around half-baked ideas into fully-executed forms cheaper and quicker than sourcing from an ecosystem where the local ecosystem's embedded culture (both socially and professionally), primary language, lingo, nuances, time difference, etc., add up to a significant edge.
What I'm increasingly seeing is ever-more fragile design cycles in the US, with an emphasis upon getting it right as far up front as possible (leading to highly dysfunctional organizational behaviors arising from the gaming of the metrics around "getting it right"), and tossing the design over the fence to the "lower value rungs". There doesn't seem to be an awareness that continuous, small feedback loops built around fast iterations are an excellent method to break up complexity of an effort too large for one person or even one small team to load into working memory all at once. I even see this a lot in commercial sector "agile" software development efforts, where even if there is some feature/area that is completely terra incognita to the team, there is little to no accommodation made to set aside generous time to perform discovery, experimentation, and trialing.
The focus upon ever-larger margins leads to value-ladder-justifications like ditching PC manufacturing, then wondering why your sales team all of the sudden can no longer organically find opportunities like they did before. Those PC's might have had "terrible" margins, but they were a built-in excuse for on-the-ball sales teams to uncover opportunities for cross- and up-sells of other products/services while discussing the latest PC refresh, for example. All that discussion that flows from those "low value" goods? The Chinese and Indian firms hold them now, and based upon what I'm seeing in the field, they know what they hold in their hands and they're inexorably leveraging those opportunities.
Ok, I'm probably more engaged in discussing and promoting Shenzhen with Westerners in English than any other Shenzhen resident. I'm a Hackaday contributor, tweet and vblog about it with more followers than any other local, all that. I'm also the most prolific Maker as Westerners tend to define "Maker" in Shenzhen, maybe China. No, I'm not bragging, check around.
>Shenzhen has only a handful of lacklustre institutions of higher learning
Shenzhen University- while not Tsinghua, it well regarded and it's graduates are quickly hired by local tech companies.
>Shenzhen spends over 4% of its GDP on research and development (R&D), double the mainland average; in Nanshan the share is over 6%.
This is true "on the ground" and it shows- I live in Nanshan High Tech Park right in the center of this. The amount of money local government and local companies are putting into innovation is staggering.
>Most of the money comes from private firms. Companies in Shenzhen file more international patents
Lots of these are questionable. There are financial incentives for the number of patents filed. Goodhart's law applies in China like no place else. Likewise- you can get grants and tax breaks opening a Makerspace, so we have over 600. In reality nearly all of these are empty offices.
>He insists this could not have been done even in Silicon Valley, because California cannot match Shenzhen’s ecosystem of “makers”.
Shenzhen has no Makers, and no Maker culture. We have one, maybe two Makerspaces in the Western tradition and their focus is almost entirely on kids classes. There are huge obstacles to actually building an authentic Maker Culture in China which we have been unable to overcome. As a result- the same factory bosses and businessmen we've always had, are now called "Makers". People who actually do technical things- let along things with their own hands are still called engineers and still very much looked down on.
We have large, fantastically equipped Makerspaces- these are about as real as a North Korean fruit stand. They are part of the local cargo cult mentality and purely for face. It is common here to have a huge, privately catered "Maker Meetup" of hundreds of people- and not a single person in the room will have ever fabricated anything with their own two hands. They are also quite proud of this.
Yes- some tremendous innovation occurring here and it's a fantastic place for hardware. No- very little authentic Maker culture and very little interest in actually fostering it.
The "maker movement" is alive in Shentzen, but mostly dead in Silicon Valley. TechShop is mostly crafters, not people building anything innovative. Hacker Dojo is appslaves. If there's a maker space in Silicon Valley with a pick and place machine, I can't find it.
This is also true in Seattle. The "makerspaces" here are incapable of working with anything beyond PLA. There are some cool tool libraries, which can be useful for larger hardware projects, but there seems to be very little in the way of true hackerspaces. If you want to get into EE or circuitry in the US, there are plenty of good online resources, but you will be at a severe disadvantage to people living in parts of the world with active maker communities.
But I think there's a reason for that. Innovation faces a steep uphill climb in the USA.
1. I have a cool idea, but I don't have the capital to bootstrap it right away. No problem, I can work and draw a wage while doing my research on the side, right? Nope! This is America, and your employer likely claims to own everything that you create or think of, on or off the clock.
2. I have a cool idea, and want to play around with it even though I could use some help with some basic concepts. Well that's great, but I'm on my own. There are no incubators that specialize in electronics or circuitry, no groups of experienced hardware hackers to mentor newcomers, and no specialized training or local resources. You also cannot source circuit components locally when most cities seem to lack a single hobby shop. Often if you want to find out if a circuit will work, you need to wait a whole week for new parts, if you're lucky and can find them from a stateside retailer at a reasonable price.
3. You might think that academic institutions would make themselves available to their surrounding communities, offering night classes and/or access to facilities like machine shops or lab equipment which are typically beyond the reach of an individual. You would be wrong; this is America, and if you don't pay full tuition, you can fuck right off.
The fact of the matter is that for all of the innovation you hear about there, it's really just romanticizing the margin thinning of existing products. Nothing wrong with that, but it's easy to romanticize.
I think we are lucky to have things like hacker dojo and techshop in our local area as well as meetups for diverse interests. Pretty sure you could find like minded folks in the area if you made the effort.
There is no Maker movement in Shenzhen- there are well-equipped spaces we show to tourists, there is no Maker Movement in the usual use of the word. Go check- no Github repositories, no posted projects anywhere. It's entirely fake- and the money well spent because people believe it despite there being no actual output.
Despite the politics, and crazy economics, China future looks amazing, because of the huge of human potential. If I were 20 years younger, and having the possibility of an interesting job in software programming, I would go to Shanghai or Shenzen.
> China future looks amazing, because of the huge of human potential.
I grew up in China and spent half of my life there before immigrated in the states while I was in college. Being bilingual and keeping an close eye on the start-up focused medias from both countries, I totally concur. And it's increasing clear to me that Silicon Delta[1][2] suppressing Silicon Valley is very probable. And Shenzhen is at the heart of it.
I am approaching 40, but if there is an interesting opportunity I would give Shenzhen calling a shot for sure.
wake me up when connections to non-Chinese servers (the vast majority of them) don't time out half the time, or connections to neighbors like HK and Singapore don't do crazy routing through Beijing, to America, to HK/Singapore and back instead of directly to HK/Singapore, or numerous key websites aren't outright blocked
>lived in Shenzhen, the internets are broken and everybody knows it
Shenzhen has to be one of my favorite cities. If you're at all interested in manufacturing or supply chain management you have to go to Shenzhen sometime and check out Huaqiangbei
I've always wanted to visit Shenzhen. Ever since I studied it in a required elective in college ("Design the City") I've admired it.
sn: Sometimes the required but irrelevant/"easy" classes do provide some value. Anyone in college should remember that you need to expand your mind a bit too and sometimes take these stupid classes seriously enough to get something out of them.
Getting from early-stage research to manufactured product would require a massive amount of what he calls integrated innovation: “Materials, process, device design, circuit design—all needed to be innovated…if you changed one material, you had to change the process.” His team had to develop entirely new materials and factory tools, including custom-built robots, to make his screens, accumulating over 600 patents along the way. He insists this could not have been done even in Silicon Valley, because California cannot match Shenzhen’s ecosystem of “makers”.
This phenomenon has been under appreciated by the macroeconomists guiding the US. If the people with the expertise, their factories, their suppliers - the whole chain -- migrate to places far outside the US, then something extremely important is lost.
And favorable exchange rates plus container ship globalization is not enough to get that something back.
What would it take to create a Shenzen in the US, say, to economically revitalize a Rust Belt industrial center that's near rock-bottom after decades of decline? I'm, uh...asking for a friend... :)
“order is important in the market.” But one of the local speakers livened things up by delivering a surprisingly stout defence of disruptive innovation.
Order and disruptive innovation are not necessarily mutually exclusive. What happened to ordered disruptive innovation?
I lived there for a couple of months in 2014. Amazing city, even outside of the hacker world. The locals are very friendly and there's a great expat community too. I would love to go back.
[+] [-] chaostheory|9 years ago|reply
No one is saying Chinese people can't innovate. The real question is whether Chinese people can innovate while inside China. (I wonder what percentage of current captains of industry in China studied abroad?) Why? Because innovation is essentially disrupting and rebelling against the status quo. ie breaking rules, disobedience, opposition to the norm
When you demand that your people bow and obey, and imprison people like A1 WW, this goes against promoting and nurturing innovation
https://steveblank.com/2012/11/06/entrepreneurs-as-dissident...
https://medium.com/@they_made_that/innovations-secret-ingred...
http://www.salon.com/2014/10/22/never_before_published_isaac...
When your culture is very antagonistic towards people who don't like the status quo and forces them to carefully think about what they say and write, the culture itself becomes a big obstacle to innovation. When you run garbage likethe Great Firewall that limits the sharing of information, that's another strike against innovation. (Of course one way to mitigate the effects of authoritarian rule is by being really favorable towards immigration from places with the opposite culture.)
I guess Shenzen is a place that's figuratively where "the mountains are high and the emperor is far away". I wonder how long before that changes?
[+] [-] Hexcles|9 years ago|reply
Although I hold strong dissent against Chinese government in many aspects (in particular censorship, e.g. GFW), although I agree the traditional norm of Chinese culture and society does not commend rebellions, your argument is a slippery slope at its best. Essentially, you are exaggerating from both ends: a. going from political suppression and a humble (or even submissive, if you wish) culture to suppression on technical innovation; b. reading too much from the so-called SV culture and success stories, so much so to draw a strong equivalence between innovation and (social) disruption.
For (a), as many peer comments have already stated, there are many counterexamples. Japan has a much more submissive culture and Russia has similarly, if not more, suppressive political atmosphere. Innovations still happen in both places. And I also suggest you to read more history to see how many innovations were achieved in unwelcoming environment. Yes, these are obstacles and might affect the scale and success of innovations, but obstacles exist everywhere (if there were no opposition, rebellions even wouldn't be called "rebellions" in SV), and small (in the sense of domain, e.g. purely technical) innovations are still innovations, which leads to the second point--
For (b), "disruption" is really a buzz word loved by VC, and there is a trend of extending such buzz word to contexts we would not use this word originally, for example an invention in a particular domain is now a "disruption" in that domain, which makes a ripple sound like a tide. Fundamental, social disruptions can be significantly harder in China, but that does not prevent other innovations, or if you prefer, "disruptions", from happening.
In a nutshell, you are stretching these two ends to force them to meet: the negative effect of political/cultural suppression --> impossible to innovate <-- the "disruptions" of innovations
And finally, pardon my language, your examples and references are utter nonsense. I know where you are trying to go from them, but they do not prove your point by any means.
[+] [-] Nokinside|9 years ago|reply
China resembles (British) monarchy of the old. There are laws, but they are not same for the common man and to the noble (60 million members of the communist party). If you steer away from the politics, you can be entrepreneur and become rich.
Corruption exists of course, but that's like taxation. You pay your taxes and bribes. Bribing can sometimes allow more freedoms than completely lawful society, because it allows more.
China has basically the same bioethical laws as the west, but they are not enforced because party does not care. China became the first country to approve the commercial production of a gene therapy.
[+] [-] natvod|9 years ago|reply
This is a common misconception, especially by people who have never lived in China. Thinking political censorship means people are docile all spheres of life.
Chinese people are actually much more prone to rant and fight over everyday injustices: shopkeeper ripped you off, denied entrance somewhere, etc. etc. They just have to be careful not to publicly blame any politicians for the issue or try to organize some group activity to protest it.
Why do you think the government cracks down so hard? Because they're scared: massive and violent people rebellions have erupted throughout Chinese history.
Many Chinese people are also quite creative and innovative when it comes to making money and getting ahead. Some home cooks make deals with restaurants to let their patrons sample their homemade spices with their meals and to buy jars of it if they like it.
Others have started groups on Wechat where members pay to get advice on X topic (http://europe.chinadaily.com.cn/epaper/2015-11/13/content_22...). There are tons more examples like this. In fact, I'd argue it can be easier to get your idea started in China because regulations are lax and it's much easier to network to get what you need.
Also, just to point out, in the West, the majority of people aren't exactly "rebelling against the status quo" and showing "opposition to the norm" because they can march in a protest or sign a petition.
[+] [-] finid|9 years ago|reply
Although the Japanese were not imprisoning people "like A1 WW", they were bowing and obeying when they ushered the era of consumer electronics a few decades ago. Now it's the turn of the Chinese.
[+] [-] nullnilvoid|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hawkice|9 years ago|reply
Can't we just say we like free speech? Because if we dont, and they can develop new commercial products without it, China will likely never get free speech. They'll just hear about it as something Western companies wanted that China succeeded without.
[+] [-] aub3bhat|9 years ago|reply
Before you call out Chinese government on Great Firewall, What about Patent Trolls? Or the upcoming Physical wall south of the border? Painting an entire culture with a broad brush is stupid.
>> The real question is whether Chinese people can innovate while inside China.
To decisively refute your argument. The current leading company in Drones, is DJI The company was founded in 2006 by Frank Wang (Wāng Tāo, 汪滔). Who did not study Abroad.
Also they brought the most populous country in the world from extreme poverty to a near superpower status, and they managed to build home grown tech industry (Baidu, Didi) while intelligently keeping SV out. Is it ethical & moral that's a different question, is it innovative? You bet it is!
If the only innovation is some stupid IOT microwave made (with heart emoji) in Silicon Valley by hipsters supporting bernie then you are utterly deluded. The chinese government is filled with geniuses. Refusing to term the enormous progress achieved by the Chinese government (filled mostly with Chinese who studied in China) as innovation is antithetical.
http://www.economist.com/news/business/21647981-chinese-firm...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DJI_(company)
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kirvyteo|9 years ago|reply
Creating an original product/idea is different from innovating upon an existing one. So is Google not innovative as they did not invent internet search? ApplePay is less innovative because Alipay (handled USD660B in 2012) was started in 2004? Or Wechat is not innovative because whatsapp was there first?
I am not Chinese but we sell software in Asia. In a smaller box, they have to be more innovative because of all the crap rules they deal with like Great Firewall. Sure, many of the copies are of low quality and pitiful. However, similar to the hindi word - jugaad, everyday innovations are made using whatever is available. In many ways, they are more flexible than the Japanese who defer more to standard practices and hierarchy.
Eventually some made it better than the forerunners. Wechat started as a messaging app but has outstripped whatsapp in terms of applications. It is so tightly integrated in everyday activities, i.e people pay for their daily groceries, buy mcdonalds, it has voice messaging way before whatsapp introduced it, withdraw sent messages etc.
I feel that the culture is only antagonistic towards people who don't like the political status quo, not business. Didi (uber), DHL type of services are illegal at the beginning but gained legitimate status eventually because of its usefulness to the society. The propaganda is not helpful but I don't see it as any different from religious propaganda. If you can ignore it, you are fine. (Well, some people claimed religious people are less innovative, but that is another discussion)
[+] [-] LiweiZ|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bleurghyflergy|9 years ago|reply
China is flush with money. So your arguments, railing against China, fall flat; unless you are willing to ignore the basic tenets of Silicon Valley.
(People also make great technological strides when it comes to defense of their livelihoods. That is why so much public spending towards defense has lead to so many innovative technologies. But that is a topic for another conversation.)
[+] [-] KON_Air|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] snambi|9 years ago|reply
Who says breaking rules are considered innovation?
[+] [-] m-j-fox|9 years ago|reply
Oh. You mean, like, hacker news?
[+] [-] tmoreton|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SexyCyborg|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samstave|9 years ago|reply
Thank you!
I am super inspired to go there... I have a product I want made, that I want to find out how much it would cost to make. It would be wonderful to go to Shenzen, but I found a place in Fremont CA that is a mfr of the component I need with offices in Shenzen. so trying to contact them.
[+] [-] gjkood|9 years ago|reply
Going into all the specialized malls in Huaqiang Bei and seeing the entire supply chain in one building is amazing.
Highly recommend that people interested in electronics hardware make a visit.
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|9 years ago|reply
What I find particularly fascinating is that it provides powerful evidence that 'open' is innovative and 'closed' is stifling.
Early on in the tech business everything was 'open'. The IBM PC published the source code to the BIOS in its technical manual, Intel and Motorola documented all of the options on their chips and how to program them, early programmable logic (PALs and PLDs) were easy to program with available documentation.
As a result lots of people built a wide variety of devices and systems using those parts, and that supported (in the Bay Area at least) dozens of circuit board houses, small run manufacturers, fastener companies, assembly houses, and parts distributors.
Starting with 3D accelerator chips, documentation became locked up behind NDA walls, access to small quantities was nearly impossible, and it became harder and harder to build something out of off the shelf parts. Designers and inventors were held back, their reduced demand for services put pressure on the rest of the ecosystem and the vibrant economy around building hardware crashed and burned. The biggest loss was perhaps the small boutique chip houses that made interesting parts with a bit of this and a bit of that.
Reading Bunny's book and the economist's article it seems that a combination of "Gongkai" and many different small factories has created this environment in Shenzen. That is a good thing and bodes well for the future growth of the area (assuming it isn't crushed by the powers that be). I'd love to figure out how to rekindle that here in the Bay Area.
[+] [-] Fricken|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yourapostasy|9 years ago|reply
I'm convinced sufficiently that America has lost enough of that ecosystem and will continue the erosion trend enough for the foreseeable future that I'm giving serious consideration to physically moving closer to China if not establish physical residency there, a possibility that was unthinkable only 10 years ago. I don't think China will stop at atoms, and challenging US dominance in bits over the coming decades is no longer fanciful; maybe not in my generation, but perhaps my grandchildren's. The value-over-time delivered from "owning" an ecosystem was and is vastly underestimated by most US business leadership that is simplistically yield-chasing (focusing on ever-larger margins). Ownership in this context is the ability to iteratively turn around half-baked ideas into fully-executed forms cheaper and quicker than sourcing from an ecosystem where the local ecosystem's embedded culture (both socially and professionally), primary language, lingo, nuances, time difference, etc., add up to a significant edge.
What I'm increasingly seeing is ever-more fragile design cycles in the US, with an emphasis upon getting it right as far up front as possible (leading to highly dysfunctional organizational behaviors arising from the gaming of the metrics around "getting it right"), and tossing the design over the fence to the "lower value rungs". There doesn't seem to be an awareness that continuous, small feedback loops built around fast iterations are an excellent method to break up complexity of an effort too large for one person or even one small team to load into working memory all at once. I even see this a lot in commercial sector "agile" software development efforts, where even if there is some feature/area that is completely terra incognita to the team, there is little to no accommodation made to set aside generous time to perform discovery, experimentation, and trialing.
The focus upon ever-larger margins leads to value-ladder-justifications like ditching PC manufacturing, then wondering why your sales team all of the sudden can no longer organically find opportunities like they did before. Those PC's might have had "terrible" margins, but they were a built-in excuse for on-the-ball sales teams to uncover opportunities for cross- and up-sells of other products/services while discussing the latest PC refresh, for example. All that discussion that flows from those "low value" goods? The Chinese and Indian firms hold them now, and based upon what I'm seeing in the field, they know what they hold in their hands and they're inexorably leveraging those opportunities.
[+] [-] SexyCyborg|9 years ago|reply
>Shenzhen has only a handful of lacklustre institutions of higher learning
Shenzhen University- while not Tsinghua, it well regarded and it's graduates are quickly hired by local tech companies.
>Shenzhen spends over 4% of its GDP on research and development (R&D), double the mainland average; in Nanshan the share is over 6%.
This is true "on the ground" and it shows- I live in Nanshan High Tech Park right in the center of this. The amount of money local government and local companies are putting into innovation is staggering.
>Most of the money comes from private firms. Companies in Shenzhen file more international patents
Lots of these are questionable. There are financial incentives for the number of patents filed. Goodhart's law applies in China like no place else. Likewise- you can get grants and tax breaks opening a Makerspace, so we have over 600. In reality nearly all of these are empty offices.
>He insists this could not have been done even in Silicon Valley, because California cannot match Shenzhen’s ecosystem of “makers”.
Shenzhen has no Makers, and no Maker culture. We have one, maybe two Makerspaces in the Western tradition and their focus is almost entirely on kids classes. There are huge obstacles to actually building an authentic Maker Culture in China which we have been unable to overcome. As a result- the same factory bosses and businessmen we've always had, are now called "Makers". People who actually do technical things- let along things with their own hands are still called engineers and still very much looked down on.
We have large, fantastically equipped Makerspaces- these are about as real as a North Korean fruit stand. They are part of the local cargo cult mentality and purely for face. It is common here to have a huge, privately catered "Maker Meetup" of hundreds of people- and not a single person in the room will have ever fabricated anything with their own two hands. They are also quite proud of this.
Yes- some tremendous innovation occurring here and it's a fantastic place for hardware. No- very little authentic Maker culture and very little interest in actually fostering it.
[+] [-] Animats|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leggomylibro|9 years ago|reply
But I think there's a reason for that. Innovation faces a steep uphill climb in the USA.
1. I have a cool idea, but I don't have the capital to bootstrap it right away. No problem, I can work and draw a wage while doing my research on the side, right? Nope! This is America, and your employer likely claims to own everything that you create or think of, on or off the clock.
2. I have a cool idea, and want to play around with it even though I could use some help with some basic concepts. Well that's great, but I'm on my own. There are no incubators that specialize in electronics or circuitry, no groups of experienced hardware hackers to mentor newcomers, and no specialized training or local resources. You also cannot source circuit components locally when most cities seem to lack a single hobby shop. Often if you want to find out if a circuit will work, you need to wait a whole week for new parts, if you're lucky and can find them from a stateside retailer at a reasonable price.
3. You might think that academic institutions would make themselves available to their surrounding communities, offering night classes and/or access to facilities like machine shops or lab equipment which are typically beyond the reach of an individual. You would be wrong; this is America, and if you don't pay full tuition, you can fuck right off.
[+] [-] tekklloneer|9 years ago|reply
The fact of the matter is that for all of the innovation you hear about there, it's really just romanticizing the margin thinning of existing products. Nothing wrong with that, but it's easy to romanticize.
[+] [-] runamok|9 years ago|reply
The hacker dojo events seem somewhat broad though many are more software based: https://events.hackerdojo.com/
I think we are lucky to have things like hacker dojo and techshop in our local area as well as meetups for diverse interests. Pretty sure you could find like minded folks in the area if you made the effort.
[+] [-] SexyCyborg|9 years ago|reply
There is no Maker movement in Shenzhen- there are well-equipped spaces we show to tourists, there is no Maker Movement in the usual use of the word. Go check- no Github repositories, no posted projects anywhere. It's entirely fake- and the money well spent because people believe it despite there being no actual output.
[+] [-] dahdum|9 years ago|reply
Techshop is just a place to learn and build things, not to showcase your commercial or innovative products. Those stay back home in the garage.
[+] [-] arbuge|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lowglow|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] faragon|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] devy|9 years ago|reply
I grew up in China and spent half of my life there before immigrated in the states while I was in college. Being bilingual and keeping an close eye on the start-up focused medias from both countries, I totally concur. And it's increasing clear to me that Silicon Delta[1][2] suppressing Silicon Valley is very probable. And Shenzhen is at the heart of it.
I am approaching 40, but if there is an interesting opportunity I would give Shenzhen calling a shot for sure.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_River_Delta
[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/jan/28/china-pearl-r...
[+] [-] FreedomToCreate|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marze|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imjustsaying|9 years ago|reply
>lived in Shenzhen, the internets are broken and everybody knows it
[+] [-] anubisresources|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0xCMP|9 years ago|reply
sn: Sometimes the required but irrelevant/"easy" classes do provide some value. Anyone in college should remember that you need to expand your mind a bit too and sometimes take these stupid classes seriously enough to get something out of them.
[+] [-] HillaryBriss|9 years ago|reply
This phenomenon has been under appreciated by the macroeconomists guiding the US. If the people with the expertise, their factories, their suppliers - the whole chain -- migrate to places far outside the US, then something extremely important is lost.
And favorable exchange rates plus container ship globalization is not enough to get that something back.
[+] [-] csense|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kqr2|9 years ago|reply
http://dangerousprototypes.com/blog/category/hacker-camp-she...
Does anyone know if there is something similar that is still going on?
[+] [-] adammunich|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] contingencies|9 years ago|reply
(We are currently relocating to Shenzhen from elsewhere in China.)
[+] [-] finid|9 years ago|reply
Order and disruptive innovation are not necessarily mutually exclusive. What happened to ordered disruptive innovation?
[+] [-] draw_down|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jaffaq|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] diefunction|9 years ago|reply