China holds more patents in AI. Why is that?

The Super Art of Productivity

China's Tech hold more patents than any other country in the world. There are several social and government reasons, but what is it about the way of of work in production in China (and Japan) that is enabling this observation in tech and innovation? 

What is it about the way problem-solving in tech works that journalists could learn from, and what could we learn from one another? This is not about the content and style of writing, but methods of production - some of this may already be visible, but rarely discussed.

All disciplines have a specific mode of learning and teaching. And in many cases disciplines co-opt from another. It's an example of exaptation.

In the early 2000 in the first dotcom wave, a way of working through a problem called the Lean Approach surfaced. It was a combination of things, iterating fast on an idea, in multiple ways, empowering members in a team to contribute, and seeing problems as inevitable that forced adaptive thinking. Teams would work on a problem and compete/share with other teams to find best practice. Steve Jobs was already using this way of working in Apple.

This form of working could be found in modules by Unis like Stanford, Harvard and MIT and many other institutions, such as our own Cardiff Uni's engineering. Take this idea:

How can you create an online directory that features basic information for Harvard students accompanied by a photo? 

It sounds like a dissertation project. It could be. It was the proposal, (research question really!) that launched Facebook. Facebooks already existed in some paper form in US unis, but they needed overhauling. Zuckerberg took an idea and through exaptation and iteration came up with a new idea.

The Lean approach has been much lauded. It's been used in Hackathons. Note how for instance in 3-days working in a team MAIJ students Scarlet Charles, Rahul Thyamagundlam and William Parry competed against the likes of the FT to receive praise for their work as innovative. 

Yet this hackathon and lean approach can be found in the Japanese way of productivity called 'Genchi Gembutsu' according to the international best seller book 'The Lean Start up' by Eric Ries. 'Genchi Gembutsu' loosely translates as 'go and see for yourself'. It embodies a number of things, such as testing your work inside and outside before releasing it to the consumer and sharing problems across teams in a structured way. 

But Genchi itself has its roots in US ideas in work, such as the Ford Motorcar system of production and industrialisation. 

In the early 1900s an entrepreneur Henry Ford created an idea for a better method of working that increased productivity. In the documentary Fake News (link in a post yesterday) the viewer learns how a newspaper The Sun in the 1800s created an efficient way of producing a newspaper that meant they could sell it at a lower cost than anyone else. In the 1950s Japan, lacking in resources were forced to innovate on Ford's ideas. 

Often a lack of resources forces thinking literally out of the box, such as if you've watched Apollo 13, when ground crews construct a breathing set out of cardboard boxes for the astronauts to make so they can survive in space.

China's tech leanings become more visible in the 1980s, but from 2000, particularly 2004 onwards several innovations around exaptation emerge, Figures like Wang Xing, Jack Ma, and Robin Li create start ups similar to Facebook, Twitter, and Ebay. Soon the tech industry would go one stage further and create the super App of Apps We Chat. A feat that has yet to be replicated in other regions - the idea of innovating on top of innovation once you have the basics. 

In his Chatham House interview Professor Jighan Zeng from Lancaster University who writes on China and International Studies, talks about China's growth in AI. In his book AI super Power Kai Fu Lee, an expert in China and former Silicon Valley expert notes too a way of working together to produce results.

Part of the key is close cooperation, which many of us do, but in a manner in which individuals are tasked with solving a problem and then coming together in small teams to share. This is different from brainstorming in large groups that have been shown to be less effective. 

The discipline lies in everyone attempting to contribute (wisdom of crowds), being selfless in their help towards each other and sharing for individuals to critique, where participants avoid being defensive. Ideas within a team are then exchanged with other teams. This was developed further in the US to become known as the Delphi procedure. 

A sprint means you can deconstruct various parts of a problem into its constituent parts swiftly. In journalism this could be a feature, documentary or long form, or dissertation. Just as you would take examples of features and documentaries to examine, this 'wisdom of crowds' approach can be used to help in several fields. 

NB: if you read up on solutions journalism, the attempt it makes is to see a project as problem-solving taking some of the elements discussed.