First Point of Discussion

Future economic development of China depends on its ability to develop its creative industries. Discuss the barriers and challenges facing such transformation.

China education would be the key to human creativity.

I think one barrier is the numerous authority applications. Google can be started in a garage in US. But the same situation is illegal in China. Our creative ideas are blocked by the high threshold to start our own business.
Liu Yanchen 2013960479

totally agree with upstair. part of creativity comes from free communication without boundaries..

I think one of the biggest barriers for creative industries is weak  intellectual property protection(IPR). I know many of us think we get benefits from loose control of IPR. We use pirate software, watch illegal copies of movies and play cracked video games. Enjoy free  intellectual property seems very pleasure for ordinary users, but it is a extremely harmful for creative industries of our country.
Because we can get the pirate copies of most expensive and advanced software with little cost, small software company's cheap and medium software cannot be accepted and bought by users. Today, there is not any truly successful software company in China. Most of software companies in China are surviving on outsourcing or software service. Our movie industry's income is only from box office receipts, because Chinese movie companies almost impossible to sell DVDs for profit due to massive pirate DVDs and countless illegal download websites. In contrast, US film firms earn half of their revenue from authorized copies of movies and other products.
I think it is the time that Chinese judicial system and government should protest intellectual property seriously. If not, the creative industries would be very hard to develop in the country.

Rocky Yang 杨剑 2013960106

Aah, great to take the 5th seat  

From my perspective, the key issue hinders this transformation are human minds, in other words, the national culture. Though in history, China is reputed with ”the Four Great Inventions". Starting from its Imperial Examination, the creative minds are killed by heart memorizing and blind following since we are young. Human Resources(acute, flexible, authoritative, etc) are one of the significant factor for a creative world now and forever.

XU Yaqin, GB, 2013990091

I would like to post 1 point from my perspective. Creativity needs free atmosphere and encouraging regulations, but Chinese traditional tends to dump the knowledge and thought into children's brain which is lack of enough thinking. So, in my mind, the schools should change the method they are used to and start to encourage children to think rather than remember. If children raise different points, teachers should explain and inspire them. Of course, IP protection is also very important.

Isaac Li GB 2013960443

I agree with Xu Yaqin that chinese education is for examination not for innovation; however, China has huge population base and limited resources which makes current examination system as a relatively fair and most practical system for resource allocation. During the economic growth, creative ideas/innovation capability will be more and more recognized by encouraging sucessful stories of enterprisers like Ma Yun.

GB, Ma Minghui,2013960194

It's astonished to hear that Nokia-- the former leading mobile communication company has sold its mobile business to Microsoft. It's verified that the distuptor will finally be disrupted or even finally discarded by competitors/market if it lost its innovation capability of keeping the track with industry development and maintaining core competitive strength.

GB,Ma Minghui,2013960194

It's astonished to hear that Nokia-- the former leading mobile communication company has sold its mobile business to Microsoft. It's verified that the distuptor will finally be disrupted or even finally discarded by competitors/market if it lost its innovation capability of keeping the track with industry development and maintaining core competitive strength.

GB,Ma Minghui,2013960194

My personal view is that China's new round of technological innovation ,driven by Central Government, has already begun.It will stimulate more investors to enter this field.And as the strong policy guidance of the Chinese government at present,more and more companies would like to join into creative industries.For innovation?NO,they are just seeking for duty-free tax policies.
In recent days the hottest technology news from China is that Xiaomi,the"Apple of China", served notice of its international ambitions when hiring Barra from Google. But I am quite concerned that a China company ,the brilliant one from thousands of named"creative industry" companies,going global is a big risk, since not many Chinese companies performed successfully.
Why so many Chinese high-tech companies finally listed in the U.S.? Why there are so many piracy cases in China?
There are three barriers and challenges for us ,namely,the lack of the Global experience in the field of innovation, without enough legal protection from the domestic government to encourage innovation,and the Chinese market is not the full market economy status.Very few Chinese companies can get so such support from government and state-owned banks just like Xiaomi,much more Chinese enterprises are still struggling to survive and give up innovation.

GB,Lin Haiping,2013970151

As one of the most important chinese traditional culture, authoritarian has been the main form from Qin dynasty,the first dynasty in china.

The feature of the authoritarian is all people bend their knees to only one person,the king and execute the one's order without objection. The objecter only have one fate: be killed or be exiled in order to keep the whole political system from disruption.

The biggest benifit of such culture is effctive execution. Even in the 21 century china, we still can see the shadow of authoritarian. When we talk about the building of the biggest GaoTie network in just 5 years, i can see it. The biggest harm of such culture is the lack of equal spirit, because people in such culture only know how to keep orders come from authorities.

Equal spirit and flow communication is the key factors to develop creative industry and individual creativity. So, above all, the chinese traditional culture- authoritarian is a important barrier to chinese creativity.

Dai Jun 2013969504

First, most Chinese people lack creative thinking. They think by the rule, because it's what the parents, teachers, the society have been telling them to do, because it's the education they receive since elementary school. They get reward for delivering what is expected rather than what's surprising.
Second, even if they do come up with some brilliant ideas, most are cut off by conservative personality. They'd rather stay safe than take risks.
Third, the resource for putting ideas into reality is scarce. There have been some favourable policies for start up companies, but still not as effective as in western countries. The cost of failure is still high if one plans to start a business. As an employee, few have sufficient freedom and support from management to realize big thoughts.

I think creative industries are introduced and promoted by people’s innovation. While it is the Chinese traditional culture, conformist mentality, that results in hindering the development of creativity. Chinese people are inclined to echo the views of others, instead of standing out to express. In contrarily; western people are cultivated with independent personality in their educational system. So the innate creativity is more easily inspired and creative thinking is eventually carried out to form the creative industries.

And now it is gratifying to find the encouragement of innovation everywhere in China. The surroundings and atmosphere of free communication produce many good ideas in enterprise and government. The mainstream culture makes positive impact on the masses. Those creative people come to lie inside the mainstream of current opinion. Such transformation brings along the new point of change and growth in future economic development of China.

Moreover, the transformation into creative industries would be undertaken at the cost of mounts of manpower, material resources and financial resources. It should be seriously considered that how the enterprise at that fast pace, along with the development of China, to share the original internal resource with the creative segment. In the same way, the government should also be prepared to take the ailment during the economic restructuring.

Junjie Wang (Jeffrey) 2013970266 GB

Viewpoints above from my classmates are really awesome. I believe Prof. Farhoomand has already read them at least three times. And he is better than us in this field. I'd like to make two simple points.

First, from external cause, most Chinese people are struggling to afford themselves.
A young man with lofty dreams can be easily overwhelmed by high housing price, food safety and so forth. We exchange time for money because we are short of money. Then We are short of both time and money. Most of us live so hard that we don't have sufficient energy to be creative. That's why poverty and ambition make strange bedfellows.

Second, from internal cause, Chinese people are highly intelligent. We'll take a shortcut by all means to gain an edge.
The most typical phenomenon is copy. The smarter we are, the more we like to copy. There is an example that illustrates the point in the graphic way.
After Thomas Zhai used his name and student number as forum ID, we all followed him without thinking and used Chinese name, English name or student number, even default title of reply.

Maybe it's easy for Prof. Farhoomand to recognize us. Meanwhile, we've lost our creativity unconsciously from a different perspective.

As MBAs, we're elites and hopes of China. If we can't be radically creative, who will be? Let's regain our creativity from ourselves.
(BTW, who said the discussion was limited to text. We can use picture, diagram and even video.)


Luo Qi
2013970436

Hi all,

Creation sometimes means loneliness, failure and rejection instead of passion and success. Many Chinese are facing high pressure to survive in this society. They do not have enough time and courage to afford these bad results. Therefore, we should try our best to provide better and more confortable envirement to encourage people to create new things. Moreover, the society should guarantee the basic living conditions and become more patient.

GB, WANG Zhaobo, 2013970280

Very interesting discussion...try to systematically think about this question…
Private companies should be the main subject of the practical innovations, but currently in China they still have huge potential, the barriers are: high cost of market entry, low profitability, uncertainty of policy, lack of support from banking system… So the suggestions from my side are:

Short term speaking:
1. Ease the process of establishing a company – Apple was established in a garage while in China we need at least 30 chops.
2. Banking system support – If the private companies can borrow money from banks easier than SOCs instead of the reality, I believe there will be more private companies, which are the soil of innovation.
3. Lower tax burden – If the private companies have more profitability, for sure they will invest more on R&D to gain competitive advantages.
4. Clear and persistent message of market economy from central government – The swinging central/local governments’ policy jeopardized the entrepreneur’s enthusiasm of building long term goal.

For long term improvement:
1. Weaken the role of the government in the market – Only to be the rule maker instead of player, to create the atmosphere of “fair play”: Big market and small government.
2. Hereby as a result, to make the education system to be slef-governed – Educate the students to be curious, independent, challenging and out of box thinking instead of just following and obey.

Last but not least, balance is very important for the above transformation.
These ideas are from whole society perspective, for a single company, there are some different ids but I have no time today, hope can post more on this direction if I’m not busy late this week.

It is generally known that social environment needs to be changed by someone. We(civilian) should...but we couldn't. They(government) should...but they won't. We all know the reason behind.

In a word, it's a nice day today!

Luo Qi
2013970436

Dr. Ali wrote:It is generally known that social environment needs to be changed by someone. We(civilian) should...but we couldn't. They(government) should...but they won't. We all know the reason behind.

In a word, it's a nice day today!

Luo Qi
2013970436

I was confused.. Seems this is posted by Luo Qi but why showed Dr. Ali at the right side?
Sorry for my innocence...

Don't care too much about user ID, pls. see my first posting in page 1.

very inspiring discussion from my future classmates thrill me a lot. that makes me believe that creativities derives from brain storm.
from my viewpoint, government political reform is essential to liberate the productivity and human creativity.our government has already tried to bulid some economic zones in order to cultivate a favorable environment for companies to compete equally. local government also give some aid or subsidy to the innovative companies in the economic zones. while, in my opinion, the whole government shouldn't intervene the economic activities.
ding jia GB 2013968471

oops~, send a new topic by mistake. here is the group.

From the bigger picture, three points need to draw attention of our government .

Firstly, creativity can occur everywhere, in each company and each industry regardless of labor-intensive or knowledge-intensive. Innovation is definitely emphasized now around the world. So is it in China. However, we are still in the starting stage. We struggled at what real innovation is and how to be innovative. Innovation usually requires lots of investment or time to innovate, although it is not necessary to turn out as successful as imagined or planned. I think that one of the practical and motivated measures is tax return or big refund for innovative behavior of both companies and individuals. This is a fundamental and simple measure to motivate both individuals and organizations to be creative, from Invention to Patents , from small helpful gadgets to good methods to streamline production. This may not be the best way but a realistic way at the moment.

Secondly, education is the root of innovation. It’s well known that old-fashioned cram-up teaching is not good for young to think out of box. The young generations will the backbone of Chinese development in the future. Fortunately, education problems have drawn attention and many modification and reform are undergoing. I would like to suggest that education resources should be averaged allocated. While schools should find way out basing on the situation itself to trigger the potential of young and children to be creative. With the education reform efforts, I hope that young people and children could solve problems from different or multiple aspects and be open-minded.

Thirdly, Intellectual Property Protection is very crucial, which I would like to echo Rocky Yang. It’s very shamed of Chinese that China is regarded as a fake products nestle. Whenever a new technology or cut-edge product is on market, many local companies will follow and copy them which may not cause serious punishment. These followers don’t want to spend time and energy to learn from the pioneers and bring up a better or even breakthrough. It’s not “expensive” to copy them and copying gets return quickly without R&D cost. It’s time for our government to make up-to-date Intellectual Property Protection policy, more strict Intellectual Property monitor and serious sanctions. When Intellectual Property can be protected well, I think innovation is recognized and encouraged in this way.

All of these are not easy, but I think policy modifications are must-to-do and would like to hold the belief that our government is trying to improve the situation.

I would like to express my understanding of tow points of view which were mentioned above.

Firstly , Education, of course, is the long-time problem we need to face and solve. What we were educated was how to repeat doing exercises to get high scores in examinations. We put lots of time to practice the exam skills. Teachers don’t encourage creativity in the school. As a result, most of us get used to follow. Then, when we are employed, most of us work mindlessly and repetitively. It seems that following the action plan is always the right thing we need to do and seldom of us think about make our own action plan. Even though the action plans are made by ourselves, most of them are just created by modifying. Looking back for those who studied aboard, they were encourage to open their mind and develop creativity. I assume, that we have several Chinese-American Nobel winners is the best proof. So many Chinese talents are seeking to study and stay aboard. How to change our education system and how to keep talented peoples in China are one of the challenges we must meet.

Secondly, I want to talk about the IP (intellectual property) environment in China. Why Apple was created and developed so wonderfully in the States? An complete IP protect law system (such as AIA (American Invent Act)) and many operation organizations (such as ITC, USPTO) are the key to make this happen. It’s pity that “Copycat Culture” is still the main trend in China. In the past few years, we were smart at how to copy others or how to copycat others. We can find many Chinese “Pad” after iPad was introduced to the world by Apple. Lacking of creativity is one of the barrier we have. Of course, we are changing ourselves these years. We are happy to witness that government pays more and more attention to IP. ZTE and Huawei are always at the top tier of the list of patent applications in the world. How to protect the companies such as Huawei and ZTE, and how to encourage more ZTEs and Huaweis established in China are another challenge to Chinese government.

Luo Qi showed a great point about the creativity... When we focused on the topic, we were lost at some level, because it may constrain our mind.

Quite agree with Luo Qi and Boris Li...Look, we have great potential for creativity.
So...from my viewpoint, firstly, the bottleneck of development of China's creative industry is short of creative talent, education and training of a large number of creative talents is the precondition of this problem.

Secondly,the problem is not we are lack of creativity, but how to turn creativity to creative industry. The core of the creative industry is to build the industry chain and extension the industry, and flow in the industrial chain the most valuable thing is the IPR. A work before being published is no market value. It will be endowed with value of copyright and protected when it is published. If the work has been made into a movie, TV and any other derivatives, the value of its copyright will be released in further.