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submitted by SirPopper on 10/20/2008

We’re already getting our asses kicked by foreign competition.  And, according to this piece, we better get ready for an increase in both number and intensity.  These countries may be poorer than us, but they make up for it in entrepreneurial spirit.  They’re also more innovative than us, at least in business.

My favorite part:

I like to tell the story of a Chinese manufacturer that was getting feedback about its washing machines’ clogging up drains. The company investigated and found that the machines worked just fine but that rural consumers were using them to wash potatoes. What would an American company do to solve this problem? Call in a p.r. firm to tell consumers that washing vegetables voids their warranty? The Chinese company had a better idea: it added a vegetable-wash cycle to its machines. We call this innovating with ingenuity–and no government program can teach this.

Original Description:

Imagine 100 companies from Former Third World countries with a combined revenue in the trillions of dollars–greater than the total economic output of many countries–competing with U.S. companies for space on the world stage. Imagine several hundred such companies. Now imagine thousands.

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