8 ms·

Shenzhen is a hothouse of innovation

215 points by frrp 9y ago

anubisresources 9y ago
Shenzhen has to be one of my favorite cities. If you're at all interested in manufacturing or supply chain management you have to go to Shenzhen sometime and check out Huaqiangbei
tmoreton 9y ago
WIRED UK did a great job going into more detail on Shenzhen, highly recommend watching the documentary. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGJ5cZnoodY&t=8s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGJ5cZnoodY&t=8s
- samstave 9y ago
  This doc is amazing! Thank you! I am super inspired to go there... I have a product I want made, that I want to find out how much it would cost to make. It would be wonderful to go to Shenzen, but I found a place in Fremont CA that is a mfr of the component I need with offices in Shenzen. so trying to contact them.
- SexyCyborg 9y ago
  Wired doc is good in parts- there is no local "Maker culture" unless you invent a new use of the word.
gjkood 9y ago
I was in Shenzhen a few months back for the first time. I can only describe it as Disneyland for electronics enthusiasts. Going into all the specialized malls in Huaqiang Bei and seeing the entire supply chain in one building is amazing. Highly recommend that people interested in electronics hardware make a visit.
- ChuckMcM 9y ago
  I've been reading Bunny's "The Hardware Hacker" and it does make me want to visit. What I find particularly fascinating is that it provides powerful evidence that 'open' is innovative and 'closed' is stifling. Early on in the tech business everything was 'open'. The IBM PC published the source code to the BIOS in its technical manual, Intel and Motorola documented all of the options on their chips and how to program them, early programmable logic (PALs and PLDs) were easy to program with available documentation. As a result lots of people built a wide variety of devices and systems using those parts, and that supported (in the Bay Area at least) dozens of circuit board houses, small run manufacturers, fastener companies, assembly houses, and parts distributors. Starting with 3D accelerator chips, documentation became locked up behind NDA walls, access to small quantities was nearly impossible, and it became harder and harder to build something out of off the shelf parts. Designers and inventors were held back, their reduced demand for services put pressure on the rest of the ecosystem and the vibrant economy around building hardware crashed and burned. The biggest loss was perhaps the small boutique chip houses that made interesting parts with a bit of this and a bit of that. Reading Bunny's book and the economist's article it seems that a combination of "Gongkai" and many different small factories has created this environment in Shenzen. That is a good thing and bodes well for the future growth of the area (assuming it isn't crushed by the powers that be). I'd love to figure out how to rekindle that here in the Bay Area.
  - gjkood 9y ago
    Actually, buying Bunnie's "The Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen" [1] was what motivated me to make the trip. I was motivated enough to spent 7+ months learning basic Mandarin before making the trip. Not to mention the WIRED videos on Shenzhen featuring Bunnie [2]. Learning the Mandarin number system made negotiating prices a breeze. I just got the Hardware Hacker a month or so ago. Great read. [1] https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/the-essential-guide-to-electronics-in-shenzhen https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/the-essential-gui... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hp6F_ApUq-c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hp6F_ApUq-c
    - canada_dry 9y ago
      Visited Shenzhen a couple years ago and was blown away at the scope. Sprawling supermarkets of state-of-the-art electronics! Met folks who were finding suppliers for their kickstarter projects... so cool. Since Hong Kong is still (for all practical purposes) not really under full Chinese rule, Beijing is pouring gobs of support into making Shenzhen the world's electronics marketplace. Fun fact: Shenzhen is home of the 2nd tallest building in the world (after Dubai).
kqr2 9y ago
Dangerous Prototypes used to host Hacker Camp Tours of Shenzhen: http://dangerousprototypes.com/blog/category/hacker-camp-shenzhen/ http://dangerousprototypes.com/blog/category/hacker-camp-she... Does anyone know if there is something similar that is still going on?
- adammunich 9y ago
  Ask Mitch Altman
Animats 9y ago
The "maker movement" is alive in Shentzen, but mostly dead in Silicon Valley. TechShop is mostly crafters, not people building anything innovative. Hacker Dojo is appslaves. If there's a maker space in Silicon Valley with a pick and place machine, I can't find it.
- tekklloneer 9y ago
  Sudoroom and noisebridge are still alive. The fact of the matter is that for all of the innovation you hear about there, it's really just romanticizing the margin thinning of existing products. Nothing wrong with that, but it's easy to romanticize.
- arbuge 9y ago
  Pick and place machines are used for volume pcb production - not the kind of thing one would expect to find in your average maker space AFAIK.
  - adammunich 9y ago
    Sudo room just got one!
    - Animats 9y ago
      Theirs is a reel-fed machine. Those are how most of the world's electronics is made, but making a single board without reels of the same part is tough.
  - Arizhel 9y ago
    They're also used for low-volume prototyping or short-run manufacturing, not just high-volume manufacturing. They're especially useful for placing high-density components; it's not exactly easy to assemble a PCB with BGAs by hand.
  - Animats 9y ago
    There's one for $1799 intended for prototypes.[1] It's clever; it uses more vision processing and less tooling than other pick and place machines. Parts only have to be close to the right place; the vision systems do the fine adjustments. Unfortunately, few people seem to have one working. There are two hacker spaces that got one, and there's even an unboxing video, but didn't get it assembled and working. I could use one of those occasionally. The tweezers and microscope thing gets tiring, fast. [1] http://www.liteplacer.com/ http://www.liteplacer.com/
chaostheory 9y ago
> The common perception that China is incapable of innovation needs re-examining. No one is saying Chinese people can't innovate. The real question is whether Chinese people can innovate while inside China. (I wonder what percentage of current captains of industry in China studied abroad?) Why? Because innovation is essentially disrupting and rebelling against the status quo. ie breaking rules, disobedience, opposition to the norm When you demand that your people bow and obey, and imprison people like A1 WW, this goes against promoting and nurturing innovation https://steveblank.com/2012/11/06/entrepreneurs-as-dissidents/ https://steveblank.com/2012/11/06/entrepreneurs-as-dissident... https://medium.com/@they_made_that/innovations-secret-ingredient-73da24fdd775 https://medium.com/@they_made_that/innovations-secret-ingred... http://www.salon.com/2014/10/22/never_before_published_isaac_asimov_essay_reveals_the_secret_to_true_creativity/ http://www.salon.com/2014/10/22/never_before_published_isaac... When your culture is very antagonistic towards people who don't like the status quo and forces them to carefully think about what they say and write, the culture itself becomes a big obstacle to innovation. When you run garbage likethe Great Firewall that limits the sharing of information, that's another strike against innovation. (Of course one way to mitigate the effects of authoritarian rule is by being really favorable towards immigration from places with the opposite culture.) I guess Shenzen is a place that's figuratively where "the mountains are high and the emperor is far away". I wonder how long before that changes?
- KON_Air 9y ago
  Well, given Shenzens whole shtick since its inception is just that I'm pretty optimistic about its "freedom".
  - chaostheory 9y ago
    Shanghai gets jealous of rivals and potential rivals and the higher your status, the more Beijing watches you. we'll see how this plays out
    - KON_Air 9y ago
      Of course there is always that but I think the necessity of a "at least one free trade zone even with free in quotation marks" will always outweight petty rivalry.
Fricken 9y ago
I'm so impressed with Shenzen, but there's nothing shocking about it. I've been following China's rise up the value chain since the late 90's. It is steady, predictable, and inexorable. They're not done yet. If America doesn't get serious about invigorating it's high tech manufacturing ecosystem, so we have the talent and supply chain needed to stay competitive innovating in the world of atoms they way we do with bits, we're gonna have a bad time... if we aren't already. (Here's looking at you, GoPro)
- yourapostasy 9y ago
  > If America doesn't get serious about invigorating it's high tech manufacturing ecosystem, so we have the talent and supply chain needed to stay competitive innovating in the world of atoms they way we do with bits, we're gonna have a bad time... if we aren't already. I'm convinced sufficiently that America has lost enough of that ecosystem and will continue the erosion trend enough for the foreseeable future that I'm giving serious consideration to physically moving closer to China if not establish physical residency there, a possibility that was unthinkable only 10 years ago. I don't think China will stop at atoms, and challenging US dominance in bits over the coming decades is no longer fanciful; maybe not in my generation, but perhaps my grandchildren's. The value-over-time delivered from "owning" an ecosystem was and is vastly underestimated by most US business leadership that is simplistically yield-chasing (focusing on ever-larger margins). Ownership in this context is the ability to iteratively turn around half-baked ideas into fully-executed forms cheaper and quicker than sourcing from an ecosystem where the local ecosystem's embedded culture (both socially and professionally), primary language, lingo, nuances, time difference, etc., add up to a significant edge. What I'm increasingly seeing is ever-more fragile design cycles in the US, with an emphasis upon getting it right as far up front as possible (leading to highly dysfunctional organizational behaviors arising from the gaming of the metrics around "getting it right"), and tossing the design over the fence to the "lower value rungs". There doesn't seem to be an awareness that continuous, small feedback loops built around fast iterations are an excellent method to break up complexity of an effort too large for one person or even one small team to load into working memory all at once. I even see this a lot in commercial sector "agile" software development efforts, where even if there is some feature/area that is completely terra incognita to the team, there is little to no accommodation made to set aside generous time to perform discovery, experimentation, and trialing. The focus upon ever-larger margins leads to value-ladder-justifications like ditching PC manufacturing, then wondering why your sales team all of the sudden can no longer organically find opportunities like they did before. Those PC's might have had "terrible" margins, but they were a built-in excuse for on-the-ball sales teams to uncover opportunities for cross- and up-sells of other products/services while discussing the latest PC refresh, for example. All that discussion that flows from those "low value" goods? The Chinese and Indian firms hold them now, and based upon what I'm seeing in the field, they know what they hold in their hands and they're inexorably leveraging those opportunities.
finid 9y ago
“order is important in the market.” But one of the local speakers livened things up by delivering a surprisingly stout defence of disruptive innovation. Order and disruptive innovation are not necessarily mutually exclusive. What happened to ordered disruptive innovation?
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
faragon 9y ago
Despite the politics, and crazy economics, China future looks amazing, because of the huge of human potential. If I were 20 years younger, and having the possibility of an interesting job in software programming, I would go to Shanghai or Shenzen.
- marze 9y ago
  Why not go now?
- FreedomToCreate 9y ago
  Except you are also subjecting yourself to poor air quality, tight living conditions and filtered news.
- devy 9y ago
  > China future looks amazing, because of the huge of human potential. I grew up in China and spent half of my life there before immigrated in the states while I was in college. Being bilingual and keeping an close eye on the start-up focused medias from both countries, I totally concur. And it's increasing clear to me that Silicon Delta[1][2] suppressing Silicon Valley is very probable. And Shenzhen is at the heart of it. I am approaching 40, but if there is an interesting opportunity I would give Shenzhen calling a shot for sure. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_River_Delta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_River_Delta [2]: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/jan/28/china-pearl-river-delta-overtake-tokyo-world-largest-megacity-urban-area https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/jan/28/china-pearl-r...
0xCMP 9y ago
I've always wanted to visit Shenzhen. Ever since I studied it in a required elective in college ("Design the City") I've admired it. sn: Sometimes the required but irrelevant/"easy" classes do provide some value. Anyone in college should remember that you need to expand your mind a bit too and sometimes take these stupid classes seriously enough to get something out of them.
jaffaq 9y ago
I lived there for a couple of months in 2014. Amazing city, even outside of the hacker world. The locals are very friendly and there's a great expat community too. I would love to go back.
imjustsaying 9y ago
wake me up when connections to non-Chinese servers (the vast majority of them) don't time out half the time, or connections to neighbors like HK and Singapore don't do crazy routing through Beijing, to America, to HK/Singapore and back instead of directly to HK/Singapore, or numerous key websites aren't outright blocked >lived in Shenzhen, the internets are broken and everybody knows it
- contingencies 9y ago
  It's not nearly so bad in Shenzhen as it is in some more remote parts of China. In Shenzhen, you can get around it in many ways, eg. HK phone with data roaming.
draw_down 9y ago
For those unfamiliar, what sort of companies, products, etc has this innovative scene fostered?
- bcohen5055 9y ago
  If it's made in China and involves electronics it probably involves Shenzen
contingencies 9y ago
Anyone keen on working in Shenzhen, please review our recent Who's Hiring? post at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14029295 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14029295 (We are currently relocating to Shenzhen from elsewhere in China.)
SexyCyborg 9y ago
Ok, I'm probably more engaged in discussing and promoting Shenzhen with Westerners in English than any other Shenzhen resident. I'm a Hackaday contributor, tweet and vblog about it with more followers than any other local, all that. I'm also the most prolific Maker as Westerners tend to define "Maker" in Shenzhen, maybe China. No, I'm not bragging, check around. >Shenzhen has only a handful of lacklustre institutions of higher learning Shenzhen University- while not Tsinghua, it well regarded and it's graduates are quickly hired by local tech companies. >Shenzhen spends over 4% of its GDP on research and development (R&D), double the mainland average; in Nanshan the share is over 6%. This is true "on the ground" and it shows- I live in Nanshan High Tech Park right in the center of this. The amount of money local government and local companies are putting into innovation is staggering. >Most of the money comes from private firms. Companies in Shenzhen file more international patents Lots of these are questionable. There are financial incentives for the number of patents filed. Goodhart's law applies in China like no place else. Likewise- you can get grants and tax breaks opening a Makerspace, so we have over 600. In reality nearly all of these are empty offices. >He insists this could not have been done even in Silicon Valley, because California cannot match Shenzhen’s ecosystem of “makers”. Shenzhen has no Makers, and no Maker culture. We have one, maybe two Makerspaces in the Western tradition and their focus is almost entirely on kids classes. There are huge obstacles to actually building an authentic Maker Culture in China which we have been unable to overcome. As a result- the same factory bosses and businessmen we've always had, are now called "Makers". People who actually do technical things- let along things with their own hands are still called engineers and still very much looked down on. We have large, fantastically equipped Makerspaces- these are about as real as a North Korean fruit stand. They are part of the local cargo cult mentality and purely for face. It is common here to have a huge, privately catered "Maker Meetup" of hundreds of people- and not a single person in the room will have ever fabricated anything with their own two hands. They are also quite proud of this. Yes- some tremendous innovation occurring here and it's a fantastic place for hardware. No- very little authentic Maker culture and very little interest in actually fostering it.
- che_shirecat 9y ago
  the seed for a lively Maker culture is there though and I think that's where the article got it mostly right. shenzhen's unique access to a cornucopia of the world's hardware is bound to prompt more open minds to start tinkering and hacking than somewhere else where that sort of organic community growth would have never even taken root. There are definitely limitations - social stigma as you mentioned, a culture that worships the tried and true road to social ladder climbing (good test scores -> good university -> good job -> ??) and looks down on anything else. But then again, that's the whole cyberpunk dream right? it's the losers and the weirdos and the nerds of society that will have outsized impact in our high-tech future. and if any city is destined to be the cyberpunk mecca of 2050, it's shenzhen. love your stuff by the way, you're probably the first exposure alot of westerners have to the Shenzhen scene on reddit and other sites. have you lived in the US? always been curious where you picked up your fluency in english and western culture
diefunction 9y ago
Every time there is good aspect about China, people in HN have to talk about Government. 4Q !
csense 9y ago
What would it take to create a Shenzen in the US, say, to economically revitalize a Rust Belt industrial center that's near rock-bottom after decades of decline? I'm, uh...asking for a friend... :)
HillaryBriss 9y ago
Getting from early-stage research to manufactured product would require a massive amount of what he calls integrated innovation: “Materials, process, device design, circuit design—all needed to be innovated…if you changed one material, you had to change the process.” His team had to develop entirely new materials and factory tools, including custom-built robots, to make his screens, accumulating over 600 patents along the way. He insists this could not have been done even in Silicon Valley, because California cannot match Shenzhen’s ecosystem of “makers”. This phenomenon has been under appreciated by the macroeconomists guiding the US. If the people with the expertise, their factories, their suppliers - the whole chain -- migrate to places far outside the US, then something extremely important is lost. And favorable exchange rates plus container ship globalization is not enough to get that something back.

215 points by frrp 9y ago

Shenzhen has to be one of my favorite cities. If you're at all interested in manufacturing or supply chain management you have to go to Shenzhen sometime and check out Huaqiangbei

tmoreton 9y ago

WIRED UK did a great job going into more detail on Shenzhen, highly recommend watching the documentary. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGJ5cZnoodY&t=8s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGJ5cZnoodY&t=8s

samstave 9y ago
This doc is amazing! Thank you! I am super inspired to go there... I have a product I want made, that I want to find out how much it would cost to make. It would be wonderful to go to Shenzen, but I found a place in Fremont CA that is a mfr of the component I need with offices in Shenzen. so trying to contact them.
SexyCyborg 9y ago
Wired doc is good in parts- there is no local "Maker culture" unless you invent a new use of the word.

gjkood 9y ago

I was in Shenzhen a few months back for the first time. I can only describe it as Disneyland for electronics enthusiasts. Going into all the specialized malls in Huaqiang Bei and seeing the entire supply chain in one building is amazing. Highly recommend that people interested in electronics hardware make a visit.

ChuckMcM 9y ago
I've been reading Bunny's "The Hardware Hacker" and it does make me want to visit. What I find particularly fascinating is that it provides powerful evidence that 'open' is innovative and 'closed' is stifling. Early on in the tech business everything was 'open'. The IBM PC published the source code to the BIOS in its technical manual, Intel and Motorola documented all of the options on their chips and how to program them, early programmable logic (PALs and PLDs) were easy to program with available documentation. As a result lots of people built a wide variety of devices and systems using those parts, and that supported (in the Bay Area at least) dozens of circuit board houses, small run manufacturers, fastener companies, assembly houses, and parts distributors. Starting with 3D accelerator chips, documentation became locked up behind NDA walls, access to small quantities was nearly impossible, and it became harder and harder to build something out of off the shelf parts. Designers and inventors were held back, their reduced demand for services put pressure on the rest of the ecosystem and the vibrant economy around building hardware crashed and burned. The biggest loss was perhaps the small boutique chip houses that made interesting parts with a bit of this and a bit of that. Reading Bunny's book and the economist's article it seems that a combination of "Gongkai" and many different small factories has created this environment in Shenzen. That is a good thing and bodes well for the future growth of the area (assuming it isn't crushed by the powers that be). I'd love to figure out how to rekindle that here in the Bay Area.
- gjkood 9y ago
  Actually, buying Bunnie's "The Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen" [1] was what motivated me to make the trip. I was motivated enough to spent 7+ months learning basic Mandarin before making the trip. Not to mention the WIRED videos on Shenzhen featuring Bunnie [2]. Learning the Mandarin number system made negotiating prices a breeze. I just got the Hardware Hacker a month or so ago. Great read. [1] https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/the-essential-guide-to-electronics-in-shenzhen https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/the-essential-gui... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hp6F_ApUq-c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hp6F_ApUq-c
  - canada_dry 9y ago
    Visited Shenzhen a couple years ago and was blown away at the scope. Sprawling supermarkets of state-of-the-art electronics! Met folks who were finding suppliers for their kickstarter projects... so cool. Since Hong Kong is still (for all practical purposes) not really under full Chinese rule, Beijing is pouring gobs of support into making Shenzhen the world's electronics marketplace. Fun fact: Shenzhen is home of the 2nd tallest building in the world (after Dubai).

kqr2 9y ago

Dangerous Prototypes used to host Hacker Camp Tours of Shenzhen: http://dangerousprototypes.com/blog/category/hacker-camp-shenzhen/ http://dangerousprototypes.com/blog/category/hacker-camp-she... Does anyone know if there is something similar that is still going on?

adammunich 9y ago
Ask Mitch Altman

Animats 9y ago

The "maker movement" is alive in Shentzen, but mostly dead in Silicon Valley. TechShop is mostly crafters, not people building anything innovative. Hacker Dojo is appslaves. If there's a maker space in Silicon Valley with a pick and place machine, I can't find it.

tekklloneer 9y ago
Sudoroom and noisebridge are still alive. The fact of the matter is that for all of the innovation you hear about there, it's really just romanticizing the margin thinning of existing products. Nothing wrong with that, but it's easy to romanticize.
arbuge 9y ago
Pick and place machines are used for volume pcb production - not the kind of thing one would expect to find in your average maker space AFAIK.
- adammunich 9y ago
  Sudo room just got one!
  - Animats 9y ago
    Theirs is a reel-fed machine. Those are how most of the world's electronics is made, but making a single board without reels of the same part is tough.
- Arizhel 9y ago
  They're also used for low-volume prototyping or short-run manufacturing, not just high-volume manufacturing. They're especially useful for placing high-density components; it's not exactly easy to assemble a PCB with BGAs by hand.
- Animats 9y ago
  There's one for $1799 intended for prototypes.[1] It's clever; it uses more vision processing and less tooling than other pick and place machines. Parts only have to be close to the right place; the vision systems do the fine adjustments. Unfortunately, few people seem to have one working. There are two hacker spaces that got one, and there's even an unboxing video, but didn't get it assembled and working. I could use one of those occasionally. The tweezers and microscope thing gets tiring, fast. [1] http://www.liteplacer.com/ http://www.liteplacer.com/

chaostheory 9y ago

> The common perception that China is incapable of innovation needs re-examining. No one is saying Chinese people can't innovate. The real question is whether Chinese people can innovate while inside China. (I wonder what percentage of current captains of industry in China studied abroad?) Why? Because innovation is essentially disrupting and rebelling against the status quo. ie breaking rules, disobedience, opposition to the norm When you demand that your people bow and obey, and imprison people like A1 WW, this goes against promoting and nurturing innovation https://steveblank.com/2012/11/06/entrepreneurs-as-dissidents/ https://steveblank.com/2012/11/06/entrepreneurs-as-dissident... https://medium.com/@they_made_that/innovations-secret-ingredient-73da24fdd775 https://medium.com/@they_made_that/innovations-secret-ingred... http://www.salon.com/2014/10/22/never_before_published_isaac_asimov_essay_reveals_the_secret_to_true_creativity/ http://www.salon.com/2014/10/22/never_before_published_isaac... When your culture is very antagonistic towards people who don't like the status quo and forces them to carefully think about what they say and write, the culture itself becomes a big obstacle to innovation. When you run garbage likethe Great Firewall that limits the sharing of information, that's another strike against innovation. (Of course one way to mitigate the effects of authoritarian rule is by being really favorable towards immigration from places with the opposite culture.) I guess Shenzen is a place that's figuratively where "the mountains are high and the emperor is far away". I wonder how long before that changes?

KON_Air 9y ago
Well, given Shenzens whole shtick since its inception is just that I'm pretty optimistic about its "freedom".
- chaostheory 9y ago
  Shanghai gets jealous of rivals and potential rivals and the higher your status, the more Beijing watches you. we'll see how this plays out
  - KON_Air 9y ago
    Of course there is always that but I think the necessity of a "at least one free trade zone even with free in quotation marks" will always outweight petty rivalry.

Fricken 9y ago

I'm so impressed with Shenzen, but there's nothing shocking about it. I've been following China's rise up the value chain since the late 90's. It is steady, predictable, and inexorable. They're not done yet. If America doesn't get serious about invigorating it's high tech manufacturing ecosystem, so we have the talent and supply chain needed to stay competitive innovating in the world of atoms they way we do with bits, we're gonna have a bad time... if we aren't already. (Here's looking at you, GoPro)

yourapostasy 9y ago
> If America doesn't get serious about invigorating it's high tech manufacturing ecosystem, so we have the talent and supply chain needed to stay competitive innovating in the world of atoms they way we do with bits, we're gonna have a bad time... if we aren't already. I'm convinced sufficiently that America has lost enough of that ecosystem and will continue the erosion trend enough for the foreseeable future that I'm giving serious consideration to physically moving closer to China if not establish physical residency there, a possibility that was unthinkable only 10 years ago. I don't think China will stop at atoms, and challenging US dominance in bits over the coming decades is no longer fanciful; maybe not in my generation, but perhaps my grandchildren's. The value-over-time delivered from "owning" an ecosystem was and is vastly underestimated by most US business leadership that is simplistically yield-chasing (focusing on ever-larger margins). Ownership in this context is the ability to iteratively turn around half-baked ideas into fully-executed forms cheaper and quicker than sourcing from an ecosystem where the local ecosystem's embedded culture (both socially and professionally), primary language, lingo, nuances, time difference, etc., add up to a significant edge. What I'm increasingly seeing is ever-more fragile design cycles in the US, with an emphasis upon getting it right as far up front as possible (leading to highly dysfunctional organizational behaviors arising from the gaming of the metrics around "getting it right"), and tossing the design over the fence to the "lower value rungs". There doesn't seem to be an awareness that continuous, small feedback loops built around fast iterations are an excellent method to break up complexity of an effort too large for one person or even one small team to load into working memory all at once. I even see this a lot in commercial sector "agile" software development efforts, where even if there is some feature/area that is completely terra incognita to the team, there is little to no accommodation made to set aside generous time to perform discovery, experimentation, and trialing. The focus upon ever-larger margins leads to value-ladder-justifications like ditching PC manufacturing, then wondering why your sales team all of the sudden can no longer organically find opportunities like they did before. Those PC's might have had "terrible" margins, but they were a built-in excuse for on-the-ball sales teams to uncover opportunities for cross- and up-sells of other products/services while discussing the latest PC refresh, for example. All that discussion that flows from those "low value" goods? The Chinese and Indian firms hold them now, and based upon what I'm seeing in the field, they know what they hold in their hands and they're inexorably leveraging those opportunities.

finid 9y ago

“order is important in the market.” But one of the local speakers livened things up by delivering a surprisingly stout defence of disruptive innovation. Order and disruptive innovation are not necessarily mutually exclusive. What happened to ordered disruptive innovation?

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

faragon 9y ago

Despite the politics, and crazy economics, China future looks amazing, because of the huge of human potential. If I were 20 years younger, and having the possibility of an interesting job in software programming, I would go to Shanghai or Shenzen.

marze 9y ago
Why not go now?
FreedomToCreate 9y ago
Except you are also subjecting yourself to poor air quality, tight living conditions and filtered news.
devy 9y ago
> China future looks amazing, because of the huge of human potential. I grew up in China and spent half of my life there before immigrated in the states while I was in college. Being bilingual and keeping an close eye on the start-up focused medias from both countries, I totally concur. And it's increasing clear to me that Silicon Delta[1][2] suppressing Silicon Valley is very probable. And Shenzhen is at the heart of it. I am approaching 40, but if there is an interesting opportunity I would give Shenzhen calling a shot for sure. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_River_Delta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_River_Delta [2]: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/jan/28/china-pearl-river-delta-overtake-tokyo-world-largest-megacity-urban-area https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/jan/28/china-pearl-r...

0xCMP 9y ago

I've always wanted to visit Shenzhen. Ever since I studied it in a required elective in college ("Design the City") I've admired it. sn: Sometimes the required but irrelevant/"easy" classes do provide some value. Anyone in college should remember that you need to expand your mind a bit too and sometimes take these stupid classes seriously enough to get something out of them.

jaffaq 9y ago

I lived there for a couple of months in 2014. Amazing city, even outside of the hacker world. The locals are very friendly and there's a great expat community too. I would love to go back.

imjustsaying 9y ago

wake me up when connections to non-Chinese servers (the vast majority of them) don't time out half the time, or connections to neighbors like HK and Singapore don't do crazy routing through Beijing, to America, to HK/Singapore and back instead of directly to HK/Singapore, or numerous key websites aren't outright blocked >lived in Shenzhen, the internets are broken and everybody knows it

contingencies 9y ago
It's not nearly so bad in Shenzhen as it is in some more remote parts of China. In Shenzhen, you can get around it in many ways, eg. HK phone with data roaming.

draw_down 9y ago

For those unfamiliar, what sort of companies, products, etc has this innovative scene fostered?

bcohen5055 9y ago
If it's made in China and involves electronics it probably involves Shenzen

contingencies 9y ago

Anyone keen on working in Shenzhen, please review our recent Who's Hiring? post at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14029295 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14029295 (We are currently relocating to Shenzhen from elsewhere in China.)

SexyCyborg 9y ago

Ok, I'm probably more engaged in discussing and promoting Shenzhen with Westerners in English than any other Shenzhen resident. I'm a Hackaday contributor, tweet and vblog about it with more followers than any other local, all that. I'm also the most prolific Maker as Westerners tend to define "Maker" in Shenzhen, maybe China. No, I'm not bragging, check around. >Shenzhen has only a handful of lacklustre institutions of higher learning Shenzhen University- while not Tsinghua, it well regarded and it's graduates are quickly hired by local tech companies. >Shenzhen spends over 4% of its GDP on research and development (R&D), double the mainland average; in Nanshan the share is over 6%. This is true "on the ground" and it shows- I live in Nanshan High Tech Park right in the center of this. The amount of money local government and local companies are putting into innovation is staggering. >Most of the money comes from private firms. Companies in Shenzhen file more international patents Lots of these are questionable. There are financial incentives for the number of patents filed. Goodhart's law applies in China like no place else. Likewise- you can get grants and tax breaks opening a Makerspace, so we have over 600. In reality nearly all of these are empty offices. >He insists this could not have been done even in Silicon Valley, because California cannot match Shenzhen’s ecosystem of “makers”. Shenzhen has no Makers, and no Maker culture. We have one, maybe two Makerspaces in the Western tradition and their focus is almost entirely on kids classes. There are huge obstacles to actually building an authentic Maker Culture in China which we have been unable to overcome. As a result- the same factory bosses and businessmen we've always had, are now called "Makers". People who actually do technical things- let along things with their own hands are still called engineers and still very much looked down on. We have large, fantastically equipped Makerspaces- these are about as real as a North Korean fruit stand. They are part of the local cargo cult mentality and purely for face. It is common here to have a huge, privately catered "Maker Meetup" of hundreds of people- and not a single person in the room will have ever fabricated anything with their own two hands. They are also quite proud of this. Yes- some tremendous innovation occurring here and it's a fantastic place for hardware. No- very little authentic Maker culture and very little interest in actually fostering it.

che_shirecat 9y ago
the seed for a lively Maker culture is there though and I think that's where the article got it mostly right. shenzhen's unique access to a cornucopia of the world's hardware is bound to prompt more open minds to start tinkering and hacking than somewhere else where that sort of organic community growth would have never even taken root. There are definitely limitations - social stigma as you mentioned, a culture that worships the tried and true road to social ladder climbing (good test scores -> good university -> good job -> ??) and looks down on anything else. But then again, that's the whole cyberpunk dream right? it's the losers and the weirdos and the nerds of society that will have outsized impact in our high-tech future. and if any city is destined to be the cyberpunk mecca of 2050, it's shenzhen. love your stuff by the way, you're probably the first exposure alot of westerners have to the Shenzhen scene on reddit and other sites. have you lived in the US? always been curious where you picked up your fluency in english and western culture

diefunction 9y ago

Every time there is good aspect about China, people in HN have to talk about Government. 4Q !

csense 9y ago

What would it take to create a Shenzen in the US, say, to economically revitalize a Rust Belt industrial center that's near rock-bottom after decades of decline? I'm, uh...asking for a friend... :)

HillaryBriss 9y ago

Getting from early-stage research to manufactured product would require a massive amount of what he calls integrated innovation: “Materials, process, device design, circuit design—all needed to be innovated…if you changed one material, you had to change the process.” His team had to develop entirely new materials and factory tools, including custom-built robots, to make his screens, accumulating over 600 patents along the way. He insists this could not have been done even in Silicon Valley, because California cannot match Shenzhen’s ecosystem of “makers”. This phenomenon has been under appreciated by the macroeconomists guiding the US. If the people with the expertise, their factories, their suppliers - the whole chain -- migrate to places far outside the US, then something extremely important is lost. And favorable exchange rates plus container ship globalization is not enough to get that something back.