Does China copy or create?

Electric vehicles, online shopping, and more – China’s ability to scale up and lower costs for the masses has never been disputed. But does China truly create inventions, or does it excel at perfecting pre-existing ideas?

Critics have long accused China of copying, stealing and scaling up innovations from the West or Japan in recent decades. But is this accusation true?

Is the ability to scale and improve existing products part of the innovation process? And has China now created the ecosystem to facilitate more innovations of its own?

In this episode of Asia Specific, host Mariko Oi speaks to Kenneth Huang, professor at the National University of Singapore (NUS) in the Department of Industrial Systems Engineering and Management (ISEM) and Asia Specific journalist Derek Cai.

Also in this episode, David Hsu, a professor at Wharton University of Pennsylvania, explains the separation between invention and innovation, and the benefit of scaling up.