What is Innovation?

8/17/2009 - Part of TCBN's IT Series
Founder and CEO of +8*|Plus Eight Star asks the attendees of the Geeks on a Plane Beijing Startonomics session "what is innovation?" and explains how entrepreneurs, China, and innovation work together.  Video captured by 163.com.


Personally, I worked in mobile social networks in Japan back in 2003. At that time there was no term to explain what we’re doing. So we actually had to evolve [a way to help people] understand that we were a social network. We had avatars, virtual goods, GPS, and we were probably about five to six years too early. So it was an interesting lesson to see that it is not enough to create cool stuff, but you also have to have the right timing and the right environment.

What is innovation? What’s the best work in the web space? Generally, the idea is that innovation is technology. But if you look at most of the internet services, actually technology is pretty standard now, like LAMP stack, html, Flash, Ajax, Ajax. So it’s largely commoditized. We could ask whether innovation is something that makes money. But then, how about those guys [Facebook, Twitter, Second Life]? They’re not profitable yet. Facebook says they might be profitable next year. Twitter – definitely not. Second Life, kind of so-so. So you could wonder then, is innovation because the service has tons of users? Is it like democratic votes? But not really, because actually, generally the services start with zero users, so their innovation is kind of already there. So maybe innovation is because, well, it speaks English? Fortunately there’s a lot of interesting innovations in other markets. Maybe it’s because news is anything that happens to or near publishers and their friends? Or maybe because innovation happens mostly, and those publishers live mostly around Silicon Valley? So they get a lot more visibility. The problem is, if you look at internet and mobile users worldwide today – this is fairly old numbers: 2007 – but already Asia had more users than US plus Europe combined. So the problem is, really, to be stuck in the English-speaking LAN.

(So it means then) in some cases, innovation that appears somewhere might be a lot more efficient in other place. As we say in China 他山之石,可以攻玉.

First, there are many ways to work with China. You can develop things in China, you can operate from China, or you can build for China. All those ways are valid – depends on your business, depends on what you want to do. I just want to go through one example, oh yeah. Basically, saying that: China is one country on the map with specific advantages, drawbacks, specific markets, but my belief is that innovation does not have a nationality. You build something that is fit enough for market, and you leverage what you can around you or other, depending on how much reach you have. So how can you take things from China to the world? It’s probably getting some form of idea that would work in other markets from start. Use a multicultural team and leverage resources as much as you can globally.

Since you are in China, try to learn from the proven models of yesterday that already work in China, and look at those that are being built right now, because of the various conditions they have they might come up as really interesting innovation. Because tomorrow’s models are born today.