Digitalization and Asia-Pacific Business Models: At the Crossroads of Multiple Cultures, Innovation and Value Creation

Owing to the convergence of multiple cultures coupled with the unprecedented rapid development in the decades since the late 1990s, the value creation and innovation logic of Asia-Pacific business models (BMs) has been constantly altered by cultural heterogeneity. As a result, a more complex and diverse landscape relative to Western developed economy BMs evolved. Moreover, the digitalization has fundamentally changed the way people do business, which has promoted a new wave of BM evolution. Unlike a typical linear mode of innovation driven by market demands in many Western cultures, a large number of entrepreneurial enterprises from the Asia-Pacific with eastern religions and philosophies have tended to adopt unconventional, culturally grounded strategies of value creation and innovation in their BMs. However, it is difficult to find a Western equivalent to the value-creating route that embodies the humanitarian spirit of Confucianism accommodating simultaneously social and economic values to accelerate innovation during internationalization in existing literatures. This book offers a more holistic picture and contemporary interpretation for identifying and characterizing the unorthodox innovation patterns and the perplexing value-creating logic of Asia-Pacific BMs at the crossroads of diverse cultures. It was originally published as a special issue of the Asia Pacific Business Review.

This book is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 72272136; 71988101).

Tachia Chin, PhD, is Professor at the School of Management at the Zhejiang University of Technology, Hangzhou, China. Before starting her academic career, she spent more than 12 years working in Singapore and China. She has published more than 100 articles in top English and Chinese journals and has served as leading Guest Editor for several top-tier journals such as Journal of Knowledge Management, Career Development International and Asia Pacific Business Review.

Chris Rowley is Visiting Fellow at Kellogg College at the University of Oxford, UK and Visiting Professor at the Graduate School of Education at Tohoku University, Japan, and at the University of Business and International Studies, Switzerland. He is Professor Emeritus at Bayes Business School at the City, University of London, UK. He has over 30 years' experience in university systems in the UK, Europe, and Asia and has won several international grants. He is Editor of the important SCI-rated journal Asia Pacific Business Review and has published over 700 articles, books, chapters, and practitioner pieces. He regularly provides interviews, expert comments, and opinion pieces to the international media, including news services, TV, radio, and practitioner outlets.

Shouyang Wang, PhD, is Chair Professor at the School of Economics and Management at the University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, China. He has published over 40 books and over 450 papers in leading journals. He is Editor of Taylor & Francis book series Advances in Risk Management and is/was Editor-in-Chief and Department Editor of over 10 journals including Information and Management and Guest Editor for a special issue of the Asia Pacific Business Review.