Chinese Culture and Value: Enhancing or Impeding Innovation?

Chapter 2 gives a clear picture of the facts of Chinese innovation, both in terms of invention as patent registration, and organizational innovation as product, process and strategy. Once “China-also innovates” is evidenced as showed in Chapter 1, one may wonder whether that is a generic phenomenon or a specific individual case. It could happen that there are only very few exceptional Chinese firms who innovate. For instance, as we discussed in Chapter 1, only ZTE and Huawei, two Chinese firms, innovate since these two are evidenced by being listed in the top 20 companies in terms of patent registration. Though we provide more examples and innovation data from the Chinese Top 500 Companies, one may still wonder about the many other companies, given the extensive size of the Chinese market and the population.