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Comment by kristianc | Hacker News Reader

It's not massively productive, and the amount of time spent at work doesn't really reflect the amount of work done. After about 5, the beers will come out.

The creative output isn't great either. Agencies like Dentsu are the size they are because of relationships, and that there will be someone there to answer the phone any time of the day or night, rather than out of any creative brilliance.

Dentsu are an example of a big Japanese company that has recently started to work with Western companies to in effect, outsource the innovation and creative ideas bit.

Your analysis is correct - once Japan lost its supply chain supremacy they were never likely to be able to win back the advantage by producing higher quality goods and services.

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>Your analysis is correct - once Japan lost its supply chain supremacy they were never likely to be able to win back the advantage by producing higher quality goods and services.

Would you say the Chinese are somewhat different in this regard?

I have a feeling they can have more knack for this going forward.

The Chinese have the Shanzai model, which almost embraces the 'copycat' phenomenon to drive innovation. It's a very very open culture where everyone publishes their bill of materials and design specs, and any other company can use them. No patents.

> http://www.strategyand.pwc.com/media/file/Shan_Zhai_AChinese...

Working for a Shanzhai company, in financial technology no less, with personal origins far from this, I agree somewhat. It is an open culture, but built with tape and plasterboard.

Innovation is easy when iterating, but such organisational culture has little push for true 'innovation'. 'Shanzhai' as a term was considered fun 5 years ago, but today is taken as an insult when such companies are CMMI5 approved. 'Innovation' is a new buzz word adopted in China over the past 2 years replacing shanzhai.

The very very open culture also results in very very quick quick releases of employees that don't maintain sufficient updates and success stories to company owners, roughly on a 2-week basis, and major breakthrough every quarter. That's not a culture for innovation, but iterating someone else's idea.

Seems like an argument against the idea that patents encourage innovation.

China seems to be heading to a fairly low per capita economy with serious long term issues. They have lots of land and a large population so they can project political power, but massive corruption at every level has huge negative implications. As does the looming political unrest.

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