“YEAH, the Chinese can take a test, but…they’re not terribly imaginative. They’re not entrepreneurial. They don’t innovate—that’s why they’re stealing our intellectual property.” So declared Carly Fiorina, a former boss of Hewlett-Packard, shortly before announcing her candidacy for America’s presidency earlier this year. Ms Fiorina’s provocation fuelled a global debate over one of the big business questions of the age: can China innovate?
Sceptics make two arguments. They point to the historically lax protection of intellectual-property (IP) rights and the proliferation of copycat business models in China as evidence that Chinese companies cannot create for themselves. An article published in MIT Sloan Management Review last year claimed that Chinese theft of IP costs American firms $300 billion a year. Nay-sayers also argue that the heavy-handed approach taken by China’s government to promoting innovation is in fact retarding it.
Two new publications bang the drum for the opposite side of this debate. “The China Effect on Global Innovation”, a study by the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), the think-...
from The Economist: Business http://ift.tt/1eJfioa
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