Technology & Innovation

Unlocking innovation in China

June 09, 2009

Asia

June 09, 2009

Asia
Our Editors

The Economist Intelligence Unit

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One in a three-part series on management issues in China, including personalisation and collaboration.

Can China become a nation of innovators? Its government hopes so. It has a plan to make China an innovative society by 2020. Increased innovation, it argues, will be vital for China to move up the technological ladder to produce high-value goods and services. Indeed, homegrown innovation could be vital to solve many of China’s challenges, such as energy productivity and pollution, and to position Chinese companies competitively in the global market.

The pursuit of these goals is transforming China. No longer just the workshop of the world, the country is also becoming a laboratory, research and development (R&D) centre and consumer market. It stands out as a leading R&D base for work in areas such as stem cell research and nanotechnology. China now publishes more academic papers on nanotechnology than any other country.

The results are visible already. China moved from 59th place in 2002-06 to 54th in 2004-08 in the Economist Intelligence Unit’s global Innovation Index, achieving in two years what had been forecast for five years. China’s prospects are even stronger in the medium term. The 2009 Index forecasts that the country will leap 8 rungs to 46th place in 2009-13, the biggest improvement among the 82 countries rated.

The government is spurring this trend. Over the last decade, China has increased its spending on R&D by 20% per year. Its target for overall spending on R&D (public and private) is 2.5% of GDP by 2020, up from 1.5% in 2007. This compares with 3.8% in Sweden in 2006, 3.4% in Japan in 2006 and 2.7% in the US in 2007. The government also foresees reducing China’s reliance on foreign technology to 30%, down from the current level of around 50%..

China’s companies are keen to contribute to the drive towards innovation. In a survey conducted among 181 senior executives based in China by the Economist Intelligence Unit in November 2008, 85% of respondents said innovation was important to their organisation’s long-term success, on par with executives in an earlier, global survey. Indeed, a large portion of our respondents rated innovation as more important than other yardsticks of success at their company: 41% said innovation was more important than sales growth, 39% said it topped operational efficiency and 31% considered it more important than market share.

The survey, sponsored by Cisco Systems, asked how China’s companies are innovating and what factors managers rank as important for innovation. In this paper, we present these findings and compare them to the results of a similar global survey of 485 senior executives worldwide, conducted in 2006.

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