China Pushing For Innovation: Can It Come From The Top?
The Christian Science Monitor has an interesting article on innovation in China, entitled, "China ready to leap from industrial to information-age economy." (h/t to China Challenges) Its subheading is "Can its creativity and innovation be centrally planned?"
Article says Beijing recognizes China must move from a manufacturing economy to more of an innovation economy and then does a good job discussing the issues involved in doing so. Makes for a very good read.
For more on innovation in China, check out the following:
• "China Needs Innovation. But We All Knew That"
• "Innovation And China -- The Long Of It"
Comments (8)
Read through and enter the discussion by using the form at the endLeo - September 11, 2007 11:34 PM
Somehow I feel the thesis is misleading. According to my knowledge, Chinese government just provide funds and infrastrure, as every rational government does. I don't see they are planning anything in sense of planning in planning economy. Funds and infrastructure are themselves kind of top-down thing. The U.S. government might have provided some funds for IBM. But did they directy finance Bill Gates or Apple, I doubt. There are a lot of High Tech parks around China providing small loans and public accessible facilities and tax breaks. It's the general market atmosphere that does not favor innovation, at least now. The investors from Wenzhou, Guangdong, Hong Kong, Taiwan, know where to make big bucks.
Paul Maidment - September 12, 2007 6:15 AM
Can I offer my own 2-cents to your reading list::
Outsourcing Innovation?
http://www.forbes.com/leadership/innovation/2007/05/21/outsourcing-china-innovation-oped-cx_pm_0529china.html
David Li - September 12, 2007 9:32 AM
Innovation is always driven centrally by an entity willing spend huge amount of money to get things done. In the US, the driving force is DAPAR which seeded innovations that driven the tech boom in the last 50 years: micro chip, Internet. DAPAR has been investing heavily in biotech and nanotech for the past couple decades. How many Silicon Valley startups were started by their DAPAR contracts? As much as people like the image of grassroots innovations of Silicon Valley, it's really a place to commercialize the military innovation spill-overs.
Chinese space agency is adopting the same model by 200% over staffing the space programs to create talents spill-over to create new industries in a decade or so. Hey, when Silicon Valley wonder boys like Larry Page and others are playing into space now, they will need someone to deliver Chinese takeout in space at some point. ;)
As for the effort of transferring the academic R&D to commercial sectors in China? I think it's a pipe-dream. The commercial sectors in China are well plugged into the academic using the professors' graduate as cheap labors. Transferring the research results to commercial usage? At least in the IT sectors, few Chinese researches results can even compete with what's available out there in open source, let along the stuffs are being worked on in the US lab.
William Lewis - September 12, 2007 2:19 PM
Hmm, Mr. Li, DARPA may have a large , but if we compare their $3.1 billion 2007 unclassified budget with US venture capital expenditure in Q2 2007, $7.2 billion, then the theory of innovation being primarily motivated by huge amounts of money from a central force becomes problematic. Especially when it takes into account that DARPA tends to spread its money around, rather than throwing huge chunks of bucks at big ideas.
Commercially viable innovation is something that is best achieved through private funds. If anything, Beijing's expenditure on innovation will more likely result in the strengthening of SOEs because the SOEs will be in a better position to collect money for their scientists and they don't even have to worry about failure. This opens the door for abuse of the system.
Government spending on innovation sees its best success in two areas: the purely academic , and the unintended results. The purely academic has little to no present value, and the unintended results cannot be aimed for. Thus, there must be someway to drive innovation, but merely throwing government money around is not necessarily the prime way of driving commercial innovation in an effort to shift the foundation of a nation's economy.
David Li - September 12, 2007 8:16 PM
Mr Lewis,
Between DARPA and VC, there is also NSF with $6+ billions budget funding innovation. Many projects were kicked started by the DARPA, either picked by DOD if it has military application or subsequently funded by NSF. VCs only get in when the applications are commercially viable. At least, this is the path taken by most of the IT projects.
For Beijing's plan, I don't think SOEs will be at better position if the budget has strings attached for benchmarks on the commercialization. Beijing has actually quietly reducing the budgets for the academy in the past couple years and I think the plan is actually to force SOE to pitch in on the research budgets.
Romain Guerel - September 12, 2007 8:25 PM
The problem with innovation comes not only from lack of financial resources, legal framework or infrastructure but also from the educational system. The system from kindergarten to university is not very creative. You are not trained to ask yourself questions or analyze but to learn by heart. I want to remind the word 学 means "to study" and also "to copy". Innovation is difficult when you are trained to copy, not to create. However, I think there has been a lot of improvements in innovation for the past decade but still there is still a lot to do to catch up with countries like the US, Germany or Japan.
nanheyangrouchuan - September 13, 2007 12:20 AM
DARPA is hardly the end all be all of US innovation, despite the need for Chinese and David Li to need a big central authority to do (or at least take credit for) national "big thinking".
DARPA often funds projects that big business rejects. The internet is probably the most famous but cold fusion and Tesla technology are also another "closet projects".
Big business invests alot of money to make a commercially viable product. DARPA invests a little money to get a concept off of the ground and then sells the rights to industry or the military to develop further.
Jonathan - September 16, 2007 6:20 PM
What about NASA, DUPONT, IBM, 3M etc.? Plenty of organizations based (originally at least, for IBM, 3M) at the USA with innovation pouring out.
China also has plenty of current innovation, it would just take a few more years of research and funding to show As far as outsourcing innovation, it has been outsourced to India for several years now.