Ten key principlesfor innovationthat Chinese businesses have been quietly and successfully implementing for years. Western business leaders make two key assumptions about China: that China is always copying the West, and that the West is the seat of innovation. The truth is surprising: China is both copying and innovating, and while Western businesses are busy looking for the next new thing, China is rapidly iterating on what’s already been done and pushing ahead. While businesses in the West are getting disrupted and left behind, the savvy leaders among them can learn, innovate, and excel – by copying China’s playbook! Chinafy distills the key lessons from China to unlock business potential anywhere in the world. These lessons serve as catalysts for how to “Chinafy” innovation for growth. Taking a deep dive into the workings of China’s most successful brands – from Haier to ByteDance – author Joanna Hutchins reveals what it takes to get ahead in the world of business and innovation. Award-winning CEO Joanna Hutchins has spent the last 15 years empowering global consumer brands and Fortune 500 companies to innovate and expand their strategies for the Asia-Pacific market. Her career in brands and marketing has been vast, beginning in New York City where she won multiple Effie Awards from the American Marketing Association (AMA) for her cutting-edge campaigns. She moved to Bangkok, Singapore, and finally Shanghai, where she has lived since 2010. Joanna continues to help major global brands create more compelling identities to stay relevant in the ever-evolving Asia context. Chapter 1 It’s Time to Start Copying China Western business leaders make two key assumptions about China – that China’s success relies on copying the West, and that the West is the seat of true innovation. The truth is surprising. China is both copyingandinnovating, and while Western businesses are busy looking for the next new thing, China is rapidly iterating on what has already been done and pushing ahead. The truth is condemning. We are getting disrupted and left behind, but savvy Western business leaders can learn, innovate, and excel by copy- ing China’s playbook. “The Future Is Already Here, It Is Just Very Unevenly Distributed” In William Gibson’s 1984 science fiction bookNeuromancer, a down-on-his-luck cyberhacker hired for one last job, faces off with an intelligent computer. Gibson, who popularized the term “cyberspace”, is well known for predicting technologies and inno- vations in his books that are somehow just around the corner. When asked by The Economist in 2003, how he predicted artifi- cial intelligence in 1984 when computers were not even yet widely prevalent, Gibson quipped, “The future is already here, it is just very unevenly distributed.” Gibson’s sentiment is that invention, innovation and progress are happening all around us, they are just not always visible from where we might personally sit. Further, if we dig into these pock- ets, we can crystal ball gaze and somewhat reliably predict the future. Imagine... somewhere in the world, there are pockets of innovation we do not see with people designing futures filled with technologies and experiences we cannot imagine – be it in a lab in Mumbai, a conference room in Silicon Valley, an office in London or even in someone’s garage in a random, non-descript small US town. In principle, the ideas and innovations with potential take hold, and like seeds are propagated and grow. If they are signifi- cant and game changing enough, these seeds spread widely and have global reach and impact. Then later for those who might not have a bird’s eye view on their isolated beginnings, these innova- tions seemingly rise from nowhere. Today the world has a great many hubs of innovation. There are countries that are nearly cashless, countries where electric taxis and public transport are the norm, where public health and safety are managed centrally with big data and artificial intel- ligence, and autonomous vehicles make not just same day, but within the hour, home deliveries. This isn’t science fiction. This is not even across multiple countries. This is China. China has emerged as one of the most advanced and technology-driven markets in the world with a largely cashless society driven by world-leading digital ecosystems. The future is here, and it is in China. Unfortunately, in recent years from 2020 to 2023, this is happening behind the closed borders of a global pandemic. With little access to China, due to with extremely limited entry per- mits and extended, mandatory government quarantine, business leaders globally have been unable to, or have chosen not to, visit and as a result are losing sight of the unprecedented progress that is underway. Some say China was already 10 years ahead of the rest of the world with its digital ecosystems, cashless economy, frictionless lifestyle in society, and significant advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) and big data. An