> Kobo says American startups like to develop products without the "impure" influence of monetization, "but [in China] the development of a good product isn’t even thought of in the beginning," he says. "Chinese web companies have a totally nonchalant attitude towards creating the actual products. They are just a lot more focused on ways to make money from the outset.”<p>...because they know that, due to their country's non-existent respect for intellectual property, they can just rip off the product itself from something created in America.
The Chinese approach is similar to the approach taught in an entrepreneurship class I'm taking at the University of Michigan right now (ENGR 520). They teach a variety of tools and models, but most of them revolve around how to identify the high-value-capture activities in an industry segment, evaluate the barriers to entry and founder capability sets, come up with a strategy to get into the industry, and calculate whether or not the business is worth starting. For the purposes of the class, they encourage us to assume the business implementation (technology) will work, since the point is to figure out whether or not the business is worth doing in the first place.