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Review: Joint Chamber - Nordic Innovation Seminar
Published: Tue / January 17 / 2012
On Thursday 12.1.2012 around 50 R&D professionals from Nordic and Chinese companies gathered at the Nordic Innovation Seminar to gain insights into successfully R&D and innovation in China. The event was organized by Innovation Center Denmark, Shanghai in cooperation with the Nordic Chambers and Business Associations.
Managing Innovation
Jason Huang, Co-founder& President of TANG User Experience Consulting, started the evening by challenging the present companies to change their organization of R&D departments. Mr. Huang advocated that the core of successful product development leadership is designing the appropriate action after knowing the users’ characteristics and desires.
To set the scene of the innovative landscape in China 2012, Dr. Max Von Zedtwitz, professor of innovation and strategy at the Research Center for Global R&D Management and Reverse Innovation, TongJi University, talked about China’s development in the global R&D market. Currently, China has around 20 % of the global academic output, and over 1200 foreign companies have brought their R&D Centers to China. The advantages of doing R&D in China include low operational cost, closeness to the market, investment incentives and huge talent pool. However, to become the ultimate leader in innovation, China has to find and cultivate its truly competitive advantage in design and product development.
Chinese Design Thinking
The last speaker General Manager of Loe Design Asia and Associate Professor at TongJi University, Wenqing Yang, presented a philosophical inspired view on Chinese design bringing humanism, self-cultivation and emotional relationship into design. He pointed out the differences in the Western and Chinese way of thinking by asking questions like; does design refer to inventing a new product or developing an existing one, and is design meant to serve traditional purposes or to create solutions for different contexts. Finally, Mr. Yang concluded that the attributes that Chinese people value in design are pureness, heaviness and metal.
Research and development in China is gathering momentum, and China has definitely the potential of becoming the top country in global innovation. As Dr. Zedtwitz argued, imitation and copying is a natural, or maybe even necessary, stage in the process of innovating.