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A special report on innovation in emerging markets
The world turned upside down
The emerging world, long a source of cheap labour, now rivals the rich countries for business innovation, says Adrian Wooldridge (interviewed here)
Apr 15th 2010 | From The Economist print edition
IN 1980 American car executives were so shaken to find that Japan had replaced the United States as the world’s leading carmaker that they began to visit Japan to find out what was going on. How could the Japanese beat the Americans on both price and reliability? And how did they manage to produce new models so quickly? The visitors discovered that the answer was not industrial policy or state subsidies, as they had expected, but business innovation. The Japanese had invented a new system of making things that was quickly dubbed （被称为）“lean（高效的） manufacturing”.（以anecdote开头引出所讨论的话题，在Issue写作中值得借鉴）
This special report will argue that something comparable is now happening in the emerging world. Developing countries are becoming hotbeds（温床） of business innovation in much the same way（以大致相同个方式） as Japan did from the 1950s onwards（从某时起一直）. They are coming up with new products and services that are dramatically cheaper than their Western equivalents: $3,000 cars, $300 computers and $30 mobile phones that provide nationwide service for just 2 cents a minute. （statistics论证形式）They are reinventing systems of production and distribution（销售）, and they are experimenting with entirely new business models. All the elements of modern business, from supply-chain（供应链） management to recruitment and retention, are being rejigged（重新装备） or reinvented in one emerging market or another.
Why are countries that were until recently associated with cheap hands now becoming leaders in innovation? The most obvious reason is that the local companies are dreaming bigger dreams. Driven by a mixture of ambition and fear—ambition to bestride（高踞···之上） the world stage and fear of even cheaper competitors in, say, Vietnam or Cambodia—they are relentlessly（持续不断的） climbing up the value chain（价值链）. Emerging-market champions have not only proved highly competitive in their own backyards, they are also going global themselves.
The United Nations World Investment Report calculates that there are now around 21,500 multinationals（跨国公司） based in the emerging world. The best of these, such as India’s Bharat Forge in forging, China’s BYD in batteries and Brazil’s Embraer in jet aircraft, are as good as anybody in the world. The number of companies from Brazil, India, China or Russia on the Financial Times 500 list more than quadrupled in 2006-08, from 15 to 62. Brazilian top 20 multinationals more than doubled their foreign assets in a single year, 2006.（很好的example）
At the same time Western multinationals are investing ever bigger hopes in emerging markets. They regard them as sources of economic growth and high-quality brainpower（智囊团）, both of which they desperately need. Multinationals expect about 70% of the world’s growth over the next few years to come from emerging markets, with 40% coming from just two countries, China and India. They have also noted that China and to a lesser extent（在较小程度上） India have been pouring resources into education over the past couple of decades. China produces 75,000 people with higher degrees in engineering or computer science and India 60,000 every year.
The world’s biggest multinationals are becoming increasingly happy to do their research and development in emerging markets. Companies in the Fortune 500 list have 98 R&D facilities in China and 63 in India. Some have more than one. General Electric’s health-care arm（部门） has spent more than $50m in the past few years to build a vast R&D centre in India’s Bangalore, its biggest anywhere in the world. Cisco is splashing out more than $1 billion on a second global headquarters（企业，机构的总部）—Cisco East—in Bangalore, now nearing completion. Microsoft’s R&D centre in Beijing is its largest outside its American headquarters in Redmond. Knowledge-intensive（知识密集型）companies such as IT specialists and consultancies have hugely stepped up（加强） the number of people they employ in developing countries. For example, a quarter of Accenture’s （埃森哲）workforce
（全体员工）is in India.
Both Western and emerging-country companies have also realised that they need to try harder if they are to prosper in these booming markets. It is not enough to concentrate on the Gucci and Mercedes crowd（值得借鉴）; they have to learn how to appeal to the billions of people who live outside Shanghai and Bangalore, from the rising middle classes in second-tier（第二层） cities to the farmers in isolated villages. That means rethinking everything from products to distribution systems.
Anil Gupta, of the University of Maryland at College Park, points out that these markets are among the toughest in the world. Distribution systems can be hopeless. Income streams （收入来源）can be unpredictable. Pollution can be lung-searing（肺灼热）. Governments can be infuriating（十分生气）, sometimes meddling（插手） and sometimes failing to provide basic services. Pirating can squeeze profit margins（利润率）. And poverty is ubiquitous. The islands of success are surrounded by a sea of problems（相当多的问题）, which have defeated some doughty（刚强的） companies. Yahoo! and eBay retreated（撤退） from China, and Google too has recently backed out（退出了） from there and moved to Hong Kong. Black & Decker, America’s biggest toolmaker, is almost invisible in India and China, the world’s two biggest construction sites.
But the opportunities are equally extraordinary. The potential market is huge: populations are already much bigger than in the developed world and growing much faster (see chart 1), and in both China and India hundreds of millions of people will enter the middle class in the coming decades. The economies are set to（开始） grow faster too (see chart 2). Few companies suffer from the costly “legacy systems” that are common in the West. Brainpower is relatively cheap and abundant: in China over 5m people graduate every year and in India about 3m, respectively four times and three times the numbers a decade ago.
This combination of challenges and opportunities is producing a fizzing cocktail of creativity. Because so many consumers are poor, companies have to go for（追求） volume. But because piracy（盗版行为） is so commonplace, they also have to keep upgrading their products. Again the similarities with Japan in the 1980s are striking（显著的）. Toyota and Honda took to（走上） “just-in-time” inventories（存货） and quality management because land and raw materials were expensive. In the same way emerging-market companies are turning problems into advantages.
Until now it had been widely assumed that globalisation was driven by the West and imposed on the rest. Bosses in New York, London and Paris would control the process from their glass towers, and Western consumers would reap（收获） most of the benefits. This is changing fast. Muscular emerging-market champions such as India’s ArcelorMittal in steel and Mexico’s Cemex in cement are gobbling up（吞并） Western companies. Brainy（聪明的） ones such as Infosys and Wipro are taking over（接管） office work. And consumers in developing countries are getting richer faster than their equivalents in the West. In some cases（在某些情况下） the traditional global supply chain is even being reversed: Embraer buys many of its component parts from the West and does the assembly work in Brazil.
Old assumptions about innovation are also being challenged. People in the West like to believe that their companies cook up（编造出） new ideas in their laboratories at home and then export them to the developing world, which makes it easier to accept job losses in manufacturing. But this is proving less true by the day. Western companies are embracing “polycentric innovation” as they spread their R&D centres around the world. And non-Western companies are becoming powerhouses（强大的集团或组织） of innovation in everything from telecoms to computers.
Rethinking innovation
The very（真正的） nature of innovation is having to be rethought. Most people in the West equate it with technological breakthroughs, embodied in revolutionary new products that are taken up（开始从事） by the elites and eventually trickle（缓慢的流走） down to the masses（大众）. But many of the most important innovations consist of incremental improvements to products and processes aimed at the middle or the bottom of the income pyramid: look at Wal-Mart’s exemplary（杰出的，值得效仿的） supply system or Dell’s application of just-in-time production to personal computers.
The emerging world will undoubtedly make a growing contribution to breakthrough innovations. It has already leapfrogged（跃过） ahead of the West in areas such as mobile money (using mobile phones to make payments) and online games. Microsoft’s research laboratory in Beijing has produced clever programs that allow computers to recognise handwriting or turn photographs into cartoons. Huawei , a Chinese telecoms（电信）giant, has become the world’s fourth-largest patent applicant. But the most exciting innovations—and the ones this report will concentrate on—are of the Wal-Mart and Dell variety: smarter ways of designing products and organising processes to reach the billions of consumers who are just entering the global market.
No visitor to the emerging world can fail to be struck by its prevailing optimism, particularly if his starting point（出发点） is the recession-racked （受经济衰退折磨的）West. The 2009 Pew Global Attitudes Project confirms this impression（看法）. Some 94% of Indians, 87% of Brazilians and 85% of Chinese say that they are satisfied with their lives. Large majorities of people in China and India say their country’s current economic situation is good (see chart 3), expect conditions to improve further and think their children will be better off（更加富裕） than they are. This is a region that, to echo Churchill’s phrase, sees opportunities in every difficulty rather than difficulties in every opportunity.
This special report will conclude by asking what all this means for the rich world and for the balance of economic power. In the past, emerging economic leviathans（庞然大物） have tended to embrace new management systems as they tried to consolidate their progress. America adopted Henry Ford’s production line and Alfred Sloan’s multidivisional firm and swept all before it until the 1960s. Japan invented lean （高效的）production and almost destroyed the American car and electronics industries. Now the emerging markets are developing their own distinctive management ideas, and Western companies will increasingly find themselves learning from their rivals. People who used to think of the emerging world as a source of cheap labour must now recognise that it can be a source of disruptive innovation as well.
Comment：
From what I have observed, there is completely no need for the Western to be worried that the emerging countries such as China will catch up with them. The constant development of a country with high rates is base on the development of the science and technology. Every year ,the western countries assimilate untold elites form the China , assuring that the science and technology is still leading the world. Admittedly, the emerging countries are pouring huge money into the education ,but it is far from enough compared with the western countries. The education in China is becoming worse and worse. How can you expect that China could threat the western countries. | 
GO
发表于 2010-4-20 22:12:05
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