Cambridge Centre for Chinese Management

A cohort of 210 professionals started their Cambridge MBA this month. With 46 nationalities represented, the class is preparing for an exciting year of learning, teamwork, and career progression.

As we launch the 2021 Wo+Men's Leadership Centre Annual Conference, we caught up with MBA alumna Janet Mui, who is a speaker on the Equity, Diversity and Inclusion panel at this year's conference.

Unconventional organisational processes, not only lower-cost talent, have led to cost innovation among Chinese companies, says a new study co-authored by Peter Williamson and Eden Yin of Cambridge Judge Business School's Cambridge Centre for Chinese Management. The cost advantage of Chinese firms has had many explanations over the past two decades ranging from lower-cost talent to state assets to intellectual property at below-market rates, as the country has become the world's second-largest economy after the United States. A new study co-authored at Cambridge Judge Business School examines a very different aspect of China's advantage: how new or unconventional organisational processes have also created cost innovation that have benefitted the country's firms. Specifically, the study published in the journal Technological Forecasting & Social Change identifies three key techniques that have provided such cost innovation in China: using customer-oriented processes to search for innovative ideas, pragmatic decision making in selecting projects, and flexible product development processes. "The study has important managerial implications because it shows that organisational processes – not only 'input' factors such as lower-cost resources and labour – have become important elements in China's cost innovation, and this translates into the ability to offer consumer products at lower prices," says…