China is a jumble of networks. The country has emerged as the world’s second largest manufacturer through an intricate system of interconnected enterprises, mostly small and medium sized, each specialised at managing a portion of the giant supply chain that snakes through China and churns out everything from plastic flowers to sophisticated computer chips.
In manufacturing, new forms of collaboration-based innovation have emerged. Loncin, a Chongqing-based motorcycle maker, keeps costs low by managing its suppliers through what is essentially an open-source system. The company gives only broad specifications for each component, so suppliers must collaborate to design parts.
But is China using this powerful tool effectively? To gauge how deeply the concept of collaboration has penetrated companies in China, the Economist Intelligence Unit, sponsored by Cisco, completed a survey of 183 executives in that country in January 2009. We found that while executives in China say they value collaboration, the concept is not always applied. And there are considerable discrepancies in how the C-suite and other executives view collaboration: the higher up in the chain of command, the more likely the respondent is to believe that collaboration is a common practice within the company.
To get a better understanding of collaboration in China, we compared the results of the 2009 survey with those of a similar, global survey, conducted in 2007, that culminated in a report, Collaboration: Transforming the way business works. Many of the findings of the China survey aligned closely with those of the global survey, which canvassed 350 senior executives worldwide. Significant differences are highlighted below.
