We cannot afford to miss the remarkable rise of Chinese business ecosystems. Alibaba and their peers Baidu, Tencent, Xiaomi, and LeEco showcase unprecedented growth and success in China and are expanding their impact globally. With a combined market capitalization of close to 600 billion USD, incubating over 1,000 new ventures and an average annual growth of over 50%, they have become a force to reckon with for the likes of Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and IBM. 'Business ecosystem' is a frequently used concept to describe the unique competitive advantages of the American technology giants. This book explores not only the application of a business ecosystem approach in the Chinese context but also deals with the key strategic question: How did these five Chinese business ecosystems grow so rapidly and successfully? The book takes the growth and transformation of Alibaba's business ecosystem as a focus case in comparison with Baidu, Tencent, Xiaomi, and LeEco. These business ecosystems developed in less than 20 years and transformed from organic growth to rapid expansion by investment and acquisition, entrepreneurship and incubation of new ventures, continuous innovation, and internationalization. This book brings insights and practical lessons on leading, creating, and disrupting markets for corporate executives and professionals in global business, a comparative case study for researchers and students of management, and food for thought on Chinese ways of doing business.

The transition from a catching-up style economy to an innovation-driven economy poses a major challenge for China. This book examines the major issues at stake, outlines developments in crucial business fields and industries, and discusses the roles of top-down politics and bottom-up entrepreneurship. It focuses in particular on the institutional foundations of innovation, arguing that successful innovation relies on the favourable interplay of business, politics, and society, and that comprehensive institutional and organizational changes will be required in China in order for innovation to succeed. Overall, the book assesses how far China will be able to depart from the Western paradigm of successful innovation regimes and create its own innovation system with Chinese characteristics.

The construction of a sustainable entrepreneurial ecosystem is critical for every country in the world, with Silicon Valley an example of a successful entrepreneurial ecosystem that determines the level of national innovation capability and sustainable global competitiveness for the United States. However, at present, the research on entrepreneurial ecosystems in academia is still in its primary stage with few scholars studying the characteristics, composition, and sustainability of the ecosystem. Sustainability in the Entrepreneurial Ecosystem: Operating Mechanisms and Enterprise Growth is a collection of innovative research that systematically explores the operation mechanism of sustainable entrepreneurship ecosystem from macro and micro aspects so as to provide value for promoting economic vitality and regional economic development. Covering a broad range of topics including sustainability, economic development, and stakeholder management, this book is ideally designed for entrepreneurs, managers, investors, analysts, academicians, researchers, and students.

By bringing together elements of a radical new approach to the firm based on a biological metaphor of the ecosystem, this unique book extends the limits of existing theories traditionally used to investigate business networks.

This book explains how Chinese firms are increasingly developing innovative capabilities and engaging in globalization. It focuses on knowledge-intensive and innovative entrepreneurial firms and multinationals, which already are – or are striving to become – world-leaders in their technologies and markets, and which do so by their use of advanced knowledge for innovation as well as their ability to act globally. The book advances related debates in entrepreneurship, innovation management, economic geography and international business.

Fransman explains how innovation happens and which factors can help or hinder, by treating innovation as a systemic phenomenon, or ecosystem of players and processes. It will appeal to economists, other social scientists, business people, policy makers, and anyone interested in innovation and entrepreneurship.

China’s new retail revolution will completely transform how the world thinks about retail and digital innovation. But is the world ready yet? In this book, the authors share an insider’s perspective on what is happening in China to reveal the future for global retail, and a clear framework to help you prepare. The book presents a number of real-world cases, based on interviews and first-hand consumer experience, to decode China’s retail revolution so that you can understand what is happening and why, and what it means for the rest of the world. Crucially, the book identifies five critical stages in the development of new retail that global retail executives need to grasp now: lifestyle commerce, Online-Merge-Offline retail, social retail, livestream retail and invisible retail. To help the industry get ready for this new, China-inspired paradigm in retail, the authors present a practical and simple framework – a ten-year strategic roadmap for global retail executives, which we call the “Beyond” the Value Chain Model. China’s new retail is not just about fashion, cosmetics, snacks, data-driven convenient stores and commercial live streaming. At a time when the world of retail is being upended, it offers inspirational lessons in innovation, purpose and agility for global executives across the entire retail spectrum.