German Business in China – Greater Shanghai Innovation Survey 2018/19
Innovation activity
"In the new world, it is not the big fish which eats the small fish, it is
the fast fish which eats the slow fish.”
— Karl Schwab
Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum (*1938)
Chinese strengths in innovation stem to a large part from rising technological capabilities,
but are also grounded in internal structures and an ecosystem that enable high local
responsiveness and flexibility. In addition, scoring relatively low in Hofstede's 1 cultural
dimension of uncertainty avoidance, Chinese business leaders tend to be adaptable,
entrepreneurial and comfortable with ambiguity.
Attempts to characterize Chinese innovation often result in the following attributes:
incremental, ‘good enough’, customer proximity, bold trial and error and speed. With this
approach, Chinese innovators made significant leaps and some managed to snatch away
market share from established multinational competitors, not only in the consumer
technology sector, but also for example, in the medical, automotive, and industrial
equipment industries.
Speed, or time to market, is especially becoming more and more important for foreign
companies in China to keep up with increasingly innovative local competitors, as foreign
companies often lose valuable time due to a culture of over-engineering, stringent quality
standards, and inflexible internal processes 2 .
This chapter focuses on how German manufacturing companies in the Greater Shanghai
region are asserting themselves on the Chinese market through innovation.
1
Hofstede et al. (2010)
2
Prud’homme & von Zedtwitz (2018)
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