Learning and Innovation of Chinese Firms

This edited volume explores the learning and innovation of Chinese firms and considers some of the remarkable achievements of these firms in recent years. It examines the difficulties and obstacles affecting the technological collaboration between Chinese firms and foreign partners and it also focuses on some of the key organizational and institutional challenges of innovation facing Chinese firms. Despite enjoying rapid economic growth in previous decades, learning and innovation of Chinese firms has received relatively limited attention among management and international business scholars in the past. Chinese firms are often perceived as low-cost copycats with frequent reports of their violation of intellectual property rights appearing in the western media. These stereotypical images about Chinese firms and products have somehow undermined their innovative capacity. However, some significant changes in the Chinese institutional environment have occurred in recent years. On one hand, the Chinese central government has devised a number of policy initiatives to promote and support innovative activities in China, ranging from the ‘Mass Entrepreneurship and Innovation by All’ to the latest ‘Made in China 2025’. On the other hand, we have witnessed an increasing number of Chinese firms adopting business model innovation with global inputs and impacts. For example, some nascent Chinese technology enterprises (e.g. Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent, Huawei and DJI) have started to challenge or even dominate different business sectors, namely electronic commerce, telecommunication network equipment, social media, mobile payment and drones. Their remarkable achievements over a short period of time have aroused an upsurge of academic interest through special issues of journals and academic conferences dedicated to the topic of innovation in China in recent years. In view of these recent developments, we aim to further our understanding about the learning and innovation processes of Chinese firms in this edited volume.