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"The common Western narrative of China is of a country whose businesses unfairly compete by stealing intellectual property from others and making money off of copycat technology. While undoubtedly a large amount of IP theft does happen in China, its hard to believe that anyone can look at China and not see innovation everywhere. I've noticed that this question of innovation in China comes up often among Western observers of China. Why? Do we feel that the playing field is unfair? Are we in the U.S. desperately looking for signs of an enduring competitive advantage even as we've shipped our entire manufacturing base overseas? I'm not sure, but the topic sure comes up a lot. Yes, China can innovate, but what kind of innovation? Jacob Hsu (Symbio) remarked that in Silicon Valley, investors and entrepreneurs are looking for "business model" innovation, which I interpreted to mean a new product that creates new markets. He characterized Chinese innovation as mostly incremental "technology" innovation in the past, but that increasing we were seeing highly innovative companies emerge, such as Tencent. He also highlighted the phenomenon of "shanzhai" as an example of innovation on a much smaller scale. The "shanzhai" consumer electronics economy in China is rapidly creating next generation connected devices out of laptop and mobile phone components, and that in most cases the minimum scale required to produce these units can be as small as a few hundred units to make money. Conventional wisdom equates intellectual property protection with innovation. But the "shanzhai" phenomenon challenges this idea. Could the lack of intellectual property protection create opportunities to remix, modify and mashup existing technology that creates an "innovation capability" for China's entrepreneurs even as the lack of IP protection prevents them from fully capitalizing on their successes (because the next guy will just rip them off)? In this

NRK, Norway's public broadcaster, has decided that its BitTorrent distribution experiment has gone so well that the company will launch its own tracker in order to distribute its programming. Norway's commitment to openness means that the files are DRM-free and even available for fansubbing.