Dragons at Your Door: How Chinese Cost Innovation Is Disrupting Global Competition

Description

The new competitive challenge from Chinese businesses is like nothing seen by Western companies since the Japanese arrived twenty years ago with their cars and consumer electronics. To fend off these fierce competitors, managers must forget yesterday's image of Chinese companies as producers of cheap, low-quality imitations flooding world markets. In fact, by strategically implementing what the authors call cost innovation, Chinese firms are advancing into high-end products and industries and competing for such high-value activities as engineering, design, and even R&D. The first book to examine this new competitive force, Dragons at Your Door exposes the strategies, strengths, and weaknesses of these fast-rising Chinese competitors, surfaces the underlying logic that enables Chinese firms to attack high-end industries, and provides critical new insight into these very different competitors.

Peter J. Williamson is Professor of International Management and Asian Business at the INSEAD in Fontainebleau and Singapore. Peter has acted as consultant on business strategy, restructuring and international expansion to numerous companies throughout the Asia-Pacific region as well as in Europe and North America. He is one of the very few Chinese professors in leading business schools who specialize in strategy and conduct research on China. Ming Zeng is currently Professor of Strategy at Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business, China. Between 1998 and 2002 he was a faculty member at INSEAD. Ming has conducted extensive research on growth strategies of Chinese companies, the competition and cooperation between Chinese and multinational firms, and how the emergence of Chinese competitors is changing global competition.