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Vision is the first step of building innovation

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A company without vision is a human without soul.
When we talk about innovation in China, people often would associate it with copycats such as Chinese twitter, Chinese Facebook, Chinese Google. We need to have a better understanding where this comes from. The development speed of China has given everyone a lot of pressure, many people don’t have time to think about new idea’s because they were all busy with earning more money for their family and to have a decent life. When these so-called copy-cats companies started, they were very desperate. There were so many obstacles to innovation and making money in China, there was very little the VC funding. They did not know whether there is any customer need for China, everyone just wanted to a quick win and taking a western model and tweak it for China was easy and widely accepted, and you can get VC money for that.
But what they have copied at that time was just the body, there was no soul attached to it.
We are all familiar with the pyramid called the “Hierarchy of Needs” by psychologist Abraham Maslow. The term self-actualization is related to what the joyful fulfillment of one’s potential, or the pursuit of higher-order goals. In the industrial age, our human creativity has been put into the drawer in order to pursue efficiency and productivity. The Industrial age has managed to “take most of the joy out of work, the humanity out of business, and the beauty out of everyday life”. Yet it also “built the self-esteem layer of the pyramid, to which we can now add the soul-enriching pinnacle of self-actualization.
Now, if you look at industry in China, many entrepreneurs and startups in China are still focusing on the layer of self-esteem or even on the layer of feeding or sheltering themselves, some are still going for the low-hanging fruit to copy and paste, many industries are still focusing the efficiency and productivity, but a good number of them are already looking into the layer of self-actualization, there are already a huge wave of new products and services developed by the Chinese whatapp, Chinese twitter or Chinese google for the Chinese market, because there is already a quite huge demand for innovation: China's internet population hits 649 million, 86 percent on phones, customers are demanding and willing to pay for new product and services to solve all kinds of problems, and there is nowhere to copy from! look at the mobile space and e-commerce, some of the services have reached some most unlikely market segments to help people to reach, connect and communicate in the ways nobody could imagine and some of them have helped millions out of poverty in rural area and give family hope for life.
The time is ready for entrepreneurs in China to think about: besides being successful to reach the product/market match, how might we go one step further to achieve product/market/society match(Known as product/people/profit)? The startup and innovative product we introduce to the market are just tools and means to help us reach this goal, they are not the destination. We need to understand why we are what we are doing.
The time is ready for entrepreneurs in China to think about: besides being successful to reach the product/market match, how might we go one step further to achieve product/market/society match(Known as product/people/profit)? The startup and innovative product we introduce to the market are just tools and means to help us reach this goal, they are not the destination. We need to understand why we are what we are doing.
In his famous TED talk, Simon Sinek has a simple but powerful model for inspirational leadership all starting with a golden circle and the question "Why?" His examples include Apple, Martin Luther King, and the Wright brothers. He argued: “People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it. And what you do simply proves what you believe”.
In order to answer this WHY question, we need to act with our passion and purpose – a strong inner drive and goal orientation, and to envisioning a better future by creating a compelling, new-to-world vision.