Recently I found an advertisement that tells us a lot about the attitude towards research and development and consequent production in China: “Innovation Encouraged, Failure Tolerated”
This is exactly what has been told not more than one year ago by the institutions which were worried about the lack of ideas and research and about the diffused desire to make easy money that has collected pollution, failures and no quality.
China faces a new era where the best ideas from all the planet are collected and financed. Shenzhen and the Silicon Valley are the most rich areas most of incubators and business angels. Hong Kong is the capital of ventures, startups and a lot of Kickstarters are here to develop their ideas if they have made a decent success with crowd founding.
This change happens at a supersonic speed, one year ago it was impossible to find a communication like that. Everybody knows today that if he fails it won’t be a problem, at least he tried.
But…. as a baby that has been told: “Now do whatever you want, no matter what happens”, Chinese investors are facing this new perspective with no clue of what they are doing, and the failure is around the corner. A success case leaves a lot of casualties in the streets, the winning percentage is, today, too low.
But the success can be hidden in numbers, let me explain that.
Imagine developing a product with a team of 5 people: you have to be focused, make your business plan, decision making, design, engineering, prototyping, testing, chain supply, marketing, think about after life, customer care…. everything should be at the right place.
Now imagine to do that telling half a million people to develop the same product; until the cost of production is low, you are sure that even randomly you’ll get something from there. For God’s Sake there will be a Nobel Prize between them that will discover the vaccine for the new virus, it’s just a matter of probabilities!
This is the best part: we will have Chinese innovative design, we will have Chinese inventions in the most diverse fields and China will be among the countries that will own technologies and sell-rent them to the rest of the world.
The trial and error way will be, in my opinion, a way to do things; slow for sure, power consuming, funny, expensive but in a certain way effective.
But what is the worst side of the medal of this process? Pollution, pollution and again pollution of every kind.
The stupidest, useless and most unthought objects are produced and sold here, millions a millions of plastic products are destroyed everyday because the logo has been printed upside down or nobody had made any quality control before starting the production of a five legged chair that collapses or of a six wings drone that doesn’t leave the ground.
I remember the example of a guy that developed a copied electronic product that needed the use of an App. Since he found that the App was free to download on the Apple Store, he thought he could use it for his clone. After 24 hours the original company found out that they had thousands of downloads but they did’t sell so many products, they updated the software to avoid the use with copies and now the guy has his storage full of products that can’t go on the market.
This is trial and error. Come on don’t be scandalized, we’ve done it for years and we’ve done it with a few thousand people, imagine the same way developed by millions. If they don’t develop the mad scientist that puts fire to the entire building it can be a success!
