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Historical and Cultural Obstacles to Frame-Breaking Innovations in China

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 April 2016

Shyhnan Liou ,
Letty Yan-Yee Kwan  and
Chi-Yue Chiu
Shyhnan Liou
Affiliation:
National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan
Letty Yan-Yee Kwan
Affiliation:
The Chinese University of Hong Kong, China
Chi-Yue Chiu*
Affiliation:
The Chinese University of Hong Kong, China
*
Corresponding author: Chi-Yue Chiu (cychiu@cuhk.edu.hk)
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Extract

China, which was once a world champion in invention, has failed to maintain its global leadership in innovation after the middle of the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644). Today, frame-breaking innovations are more likely to originate from European and North American countries than from China. In the perspective article (Augier, Guo, & Rowen, 2016), the authors attribute this phenomenon, which is often referred to as the Needham Puzzle, to three reasons: (1) the Chinese did not develop a scientific method like that in the West; (2) lack of educational diversity and structural inertia in China; and (3) lack of openness to the outside world. The authors also attribute the US's leadership in innovation to its culture of encouraging experimentation, tolerating failure and accepting deviance, and to its institutional support for decentralization of and competition in R&D and basic research. This commentary aims to enrich this insightful analysis. We focus on (1) the reasons for the demise of Chinese leadership in science and technology since the middle of the Ming dynasty, and (2) the historical and cultural obstacles to the development of frame-breaking innovations in modern China.

Type
Commentaries
Information
Management and Organization Review , Volume 12 , Issue 1 , March 2016 , pp. 35 - 39
Copyright
Copyright © The International Association for Chinese Management Research 2016 

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