A look under the hood of 3 of Asia's most innovative companies.

American business magazine The Fast Company compiled a list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies in 2019. We went through the list and took a deeper look at 2 Asian companies to see why they topped the chart. In addition, we looked at one other Chinese company that contributes to China's sustainability revolution.

Meituan Dianping - Beijing

Sitting pretty in the top spot is Meituan Dianping one of China’s newer tech giants and a Tencent-backed tech platform. Recognized for its “pioneering transactional super apps”, the Chinese company accelerates the booking and delivery of services such as food, hotel stays, and movie tickets. In the first half of 2018, it facilitated 27.7 billion transactions, worth approximately US$33.8 billion, for over 350 million people in 2,800 different cities.

Meituan first came about in 2010 established by Wang Xing as a group discount website that sells coupons for deals, similar to it's contemporary Groupon. After it merged with Dianping in 2015, Meituan Dianping transformed into a “transactional super app”, connecting essentially all types of consumer transaction on its platform. Super apps in China provide an all-encompassing mobile experience where users can seamlessly move from one service to another without ever switching between apps.

To make itself even more indispensable in people’s lives, in 2018 Meituan Dianping introduced a new concept of intelligent delivery by featuring driverless delivery vehicles and drones to shuttle meals from restaurants to consumers. With the surging demand for food deliveries in China, Meituan Dianping is applying autonomous delivery technologies in its operations to improve operating efficiency, reduce logistic cost and drive growth of the real economy.

In the past, we often tie innovation to tangibles that we can physically touch or hold. Innovation nowadays however appears to be about redefining the medium or channel of exchange. Meituan Dianping exemplifies the modern day innovation example by merging a variety of services into one centralized platform.

Grab - Singapore

Tightly following Meituan Dianping on top of the list is the Singaporean-based Online-to-Offline (O2O) mobile platform giant Grab . Grab is the leading provider of ride hailing, fintech and marketplace services in Southeast Asia. Reportedly worth over US$14 billion, Grab is used by over 36 million passengers in 8 countries, recording an average number of 46 million rides per day and totaling 2.5 billion rides to date.

One year before Uber rolled out in Asian markets such as India and Singapore, Grab first launched in 2012 in Malaysia, giving it a head start and allowing it to gather comprehensive data and information about the market it serves.

Grab adopts a “hyperlocal” strategy catered for the specific needs of each city. For example, commuters in Jakarta and Ho Chi Minh frequently ride motorbikes to get around traffic jam. To effectively address this, Grab introduced to these markets a service called GrabBike, which offers safe on-demand motorbike rides. Another manifestation of the hyperlocal strategy is GrabHitch, which is a social carpooling platform for commuters wanting to hitch a ride with someone going the same direction. The service has assisted thousands of people safely commute daily in and out of megacities like Jakarta. It is also a step forward in moving more people with fewer vehicles to cut road congestion and to reduce pollution.

Grab’s objectives can only be attained in a surrounding that actively nurtures innovation. Supported already by 7 global R&D centers in Singapore, Beijing, Bangalore, Seattle, Jakarta, Ho Chi Minh City and Kuala Lumpur, Grab is still actively looking for investments for them to create more “innovative products”, as the Company’s new Singaporean head Yee Wee Tang said. Less than a month after securing US$1.46 billion from Softbank Vision Fund, in April 2019 Grab intended to raise another US$2 billion from private investors this year.

Broad Group - Changsha

One of the most remarkable Chinese companies that are making waves in the areas of green industry and sustainable development is Broad Group, a Chinese non-electric central air conditioning giant.

For more than twenty years Broad Group has invested money and IP effort in developing a patented, non-electric waste heat air chiller in its air conditioning design. Instead of using Freon - the traditionally used chiller, the system utilises natural gas to produce a solution that eventually cools the air. What that entails is the capturing of steam and exhaust from your building or neighbourhood and converting it into useful energy.  Each energy unit may seem negligible on its own, but taken all together it adds up to awful waste. And Broad Group actively converts that waste into treasure. The design is highly regarded as a milestone for energy effectiveness.

Broad Group recognizes the role that innovation will play in expediting it towards its sustainable development goals and continues to promote the growth of technological advancements. In recent years, Broad Group has also become a well-known manufacturer of sustainable prefabricated buildings, which reduce materials consumption five-fold and manufacturing waste by 99%. This means low cost of construction, high thermal efficiency leading to low maintenance cost, inside air that is 9 times purer than outside air and earthquake-resistant to level 9. Almost 100% of the sections are prefrabicated in factories, and their light weight and modularity enable rapid construction as well as energy saving.

Two buildings constructed using Broad Group's older generation material based on light steel are a 30 floor hotel called T30 in Xiangyin - a county of Hunan, and a 57-floor skyscraper called J57 in Changsha - capital of Hunan. The construction of both buildings took less than 20 days.

Innovation fueling a company

Innovation is the only way to generate a sustainable competitive advantage and market success. Innovation secures tomorrow’s revenue, lowers costs, and differentiates companies from the market. However, a good business model that only provides a brief market advantage and disappears after a year is not the right approach. In order to create a market advantage over the entire duration of the company, professionally implemented innovation management is indispensable.

By Johan Persson / Innovation Director cmonde.com

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C’monde is a full service Design & Innovation Consultancy with a mission to transform untapped customer needs into new products, services and assets.

Founded in 2010, C’monde has established itself as one of Hong Kong’s premier Design and Innovation Agencies and work with top-tier global brands and Government bodies both in Hong Kong and Sweden.

Our location in Hong Kong, close to the technology rich Shenzhen and China Greater Bay enables us to increase speed and improve innovation feasibility as we benefit from our vast network of best-in-class hardware suppliers earned from being in China for over a decade.