Cutting edge innovation to come from China(2)

Williamson, the son of a British entrepreneur, was raised in Australia, where he took a first class degree in economics from Macquarie University in New South Wales.

"It was the somewhat grim 1970s in the United Kingdom and not a very exciting prospect so I decided to stay in Australia," he says.

He then went on to work for Merrill Lynch in London, New York and Singapore before winning a Fulbright scholarship to Harvard.

After Harvard, he embarked on a career in management consultancy with the Boston Consulting Group in the 1980s when he went to China for the first time assisting a UK textile company expand its operations in Tianjin.

"I remember taking the train from Beijing, which used to take about two hours then and the cleaners coming in to wash the floors while you were sitting on board. You had to move your feet. Your own comfort was secondary," he says.

He decided to return to academia in 1987, taking up a lectureship at London Business School. He kept close links with business, holding a directorship among others with Glenmorangie whisky.

"I felt that if I was to return to academia it had to be then because it is not something you can enter later if you haven't published things," he says.

After London, he moved back to Harvard in 1993 to be visiting professor of global management.

Two years later he moved to INSEAD in Fontainebleau, where eventually became involved in setting up a campus in Singapore.

He also further cemented his links with China being visiting professor of strategy at the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business in Beijing between 2003 and 2007, after which he joined Cambridge University's Judge Business School, where he has been for the past seven years.

He has written no fewer than nine books, including Dragons at Your Door: How Chinese Cost Innovation is Disrupting the Rules of Global Competition with Ming Zeng, chief strategy officer of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.

One of the big debates in management circles is whether Chinese management practices will become recognized in the same way as JIT or TQM.

One of the barriers is that Western scientists and research and development teams are paid well and do not want to do mundane tasks so they would find it hard to adapt to a Chinese management approach.

"If you went to them and said that you wanted them to do a whole series of changes to something very quickly or re-engineer this technology so that it comes down in price, they would kind of yawn and say it is not interesting."

Williamson predicts what many Western companies will do is form partnerships with Chinese companies so they can take advantage of these new management techniques, particularly in the innovation field.

"I think a number of UK companies are already doing this. What used to happen was that a UK company would come up with an innovation and sell it to the United States where they would be turned into mass market products.

"Now they are going to China, finding a Chinese company that has got this product design engine and the ability to build a big plant fast and I think we are going to get these interesting new alliances emerging."

Williamson thinks there should be nothing surprising about new management ideas emerging out of China because of the sheer speed of the development of its economy.

"I think it is important to say that we are not saying that Chinese organizations have sat down in a room and come up with a new strategy called accelerated innovation. You have an environment, however, where things are moving fast, people are willing to try new things and where there is hypercompetition."