I had some discussions on whether China would surpass United States on innovation with some entrepreneurs during last weekend's APEC. The conclusion is United Stats has advantages on innovation today, but in the future, China's innovation will be more widespread and successful. For the next 10 years, what advantages do United States and China have?Actually United States has obvious advantages, especially on innovation structure and innovation culture.Technology -- It's undoubted that United States has technology advantage. Besides technology, Unites States has maturer research funding sys...

The fundamental difference between Beijing and Silicon Valley is not the sky color, but the fact that on one side the young people are talking about buying a new house, a new car and getting married, while on the other side young people are talking about how to change the world.Now and then we can read from the newspaper or the Internet that a Silicon Valley company is valued over 1 billion US dollars. Also we can see many famous US IT brands on the Internet such as Google, Facebook,Twitter, Amazon... People are still wondering about why US companies are so creative. While in other places such...

Google has been known for its innovation In Google there is a "welfare": each employee can spare 20% of his/her time to do what he/she likes to do so that any idea has a chance to be turned into reality. Perhaps this freedom makes Google capable of introducing new products and new ideas continuously.Google China held a small discussion session in its office in Tsinghua Science Park recently, Google Creative Director Tom Uglow shared some experience and cases of Google in production and innovation, it is worth learning and referencing. According to Tom Uglow, with development of technology, the...

Dieter Rams is one of the most important designers of the 20th century but his famous 10 principles for good design focused on industrial design. Here Lisbon-based designer Nuno Loureiro applies them to web design “My heart belongs to the details. I actually always found them to be more important than the big picture. Nothing works without details. They are everything, the baseline of quality”  â€“ Dieter RamsSince I got to know the work of Dieter Rams back in college, I became fascinated by the exceptional pro...

A manager took me aside at a recent engagement. “You know, Johanna, there’s something I just don’t understand about this agile thing. It sure doesn’t look like everyone is being used at 100 percent.”“And what if they aren’t being used at 100 percent? Is that a problem for you?”“Heck, yes. I’m paying their salaries! I want to know I’m getting their full value for what I’m paying them!”“What if I told you you were probably getting more value than what you were paying, maybe one and a half to twice as much?...

Introduction On an evolutionary scale of innovation from one to ten (one being Bloomberg and Citi Group, eight being Google and Cirque Du Soleil, and ten being the company you couldn't imagine in your wildest dreams), the company I work for is about a three1. Being employed by this bastion of ingenuity affords me certain opportunities I can't get elsewhere. For example, every developer gets to interview potential candidates he might end up working with. During our last round of these int...

As a software developer, I get to know a lot of other software developers. Many of the software developers I know are either running a startup, working as an early employee for a startup, doing contract jobs for a startup, or dreaming of one day starting a startup. My point is that software developers are very interested in startups, either starting them or working for them.My advice to anyone who’s interested in startups: Before you ever start a startup, try to make at least one cool and useful project. It doesn’t have to make money; in fact, it’s better if your...

Photo Credit: Pranav MistryBeing a good hacker is an invaluable skill. But is being a coder the same as being a hacker? Is it possible that coders are at a creative disadvantage to hackers who don’t know how to code?Here’s a story that helped me see the difference.I was recently invited to mentor at Startup Weekend. On Friday night, we gathered to eat pizza, pitch ideas, create teams and discuss launch plans. At the end of the day, everyone was feeling great about what they’d be working on for the rest of the weekend.I arrived Saturday morning to find people hard at w...