alt Hacker NewsI generally think both attitudes are a too simplistic look.
Basically, the most common pattern with „commodity“ tech seems to be like this.
Western companies go ahead and expend a lot of R&D to establish a new market or validate a market need. Chinese companies go ahead and flood the market with slighly worse but significantly cheaper versions of said product (often forcing the „inventor“ company to take a significant margin hit, reducing new R&D budgets). Chinese companies them spend R&D on iterating on new features of the product (which they also can, because they saved a lot of R&D on the first product iteration).
„Western“ companies mostly created the situation for themselves. They basically consolidated all their manufacturing in China. China has also invested tremendous amounts into education and qualification. So China effectively turned from „the workbench of the world“ into a country where companies have extensive knowledge in product design, development, testing and manufacturing - as well as a mostly local supply chain.
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No, as someone in the western side of product development things. The problem is studied in the standard MBA course for Strategy, without even China mentioned.
First-mover advantage, which comes from R&D into new markets is short lived no matter what. It is critical for firms that hit new ground to find ways to continue to grow their position and market as soon as they can. Copy-cat firms always always come, even big western megacorps love to come in and push out the little western corps, this is typically what is taught in said MBA class. Depending on the market, making newer products that are cheaper is absolutely something a firm must evaluate if there is a demand for it that can be a position and a threat to them.
It's simply the song and dance of the business lifecycle. It's one of the many reasons why 90% of startups fail.
iRobot hasn't got that excuse. They had market dominance and high margins for long enough that, had they retained focus, they could've created follow up products that would've made for durable, defensible market leadership, even if not every product was a success. I hope everyone is clear that that's the world we live in now <cough>Model Y</cough>.
That's how it is today. The R&D will follow the manufacturing capacity, where it's cheaper and more efficient in every way.
The west was extremely foolish to think that IP would scale beyond national markets for very long.
That makes sense, are there any expamples of the Chinese leading in a market + R&D yet?
Western politicians did it to us. China was allowed into the WTO but never held to any of the rules.
It is still treated with kid gloves by governments as if it were a developing country despite the fact that it hasn't needed such treatment for decades.