Cultural Innovation Accelerators
By: Christopher Nheu
Tags: Design, China, Startup, Personal Development, Innovation

1. China is the Mammoth in the Room

Forget all you know. China is fucking huge. The scariest part is that nobody knows just how far China has come.

I met Edward Tse, the author of China’s Disruptors in our Shanghai Summit. He told me the one thing to take away from his book was that the Chinese knew how to innovate, they’re not just copycats anymore.

The West, encumbered by bureaucracy, simply does not know what is coming. No developed country has anywhere near as advanced a mobile payments solution as China does.

No developed country has anywhere near as advanced an ecommerce logistics platform as China does. When I dropship items via AliExpress on my ecommerce business Discover Qi (btw like my Facebook page #shamelessplug), it costs me $3 to get tracking and have my supplier send it straight to my customers anywhere in the world.

When I don’t drop ship, I pay customs for ordering in bulk, handle packaging myself, then pay $8.80 to send a package just within Australia. It’s absolutely flipping crazy.

Just as before, the Middle Kingdom has never used brute force to conquer the world (as the West did).

Throughout CAMP we learnt that the Chinese think and formulate their solutions before speaking out loud. We underestimate our Chinese student compatriots, when we sit in our lecture theaters and find that none of them speak up.

That’s why only a few people in CAMP knew that we had YuJia, a quietly spoken, incredibly intelligent and funny Chinese lady, sitting amongst us.

YuJia is the CMO of UiSee. Heard of UiSee? Didn’t think so. They’re a Beijing-based autonomous vehicle startup.

They’re rumored to be working with Didi (you know the guys who got $1B from Apple and beat the crap out of Uber), led by ex-director of Intel Labs and with over 40 AI engineers.

Just as before, the Middle Kingdom has never used brute force to conquer the world (as the West did). It’s even more invisible now that it’s happening in the cloud (you’ll understand the double entendre if you read on).

Get your head out of the sand. The game has changed.

2. Design Thinking Is More Important Than Ever.

In an increasingly, connected world, the future of work is one that will transcend all boundaries of space and time.

We will increasingly work via distance and communicate asynchronously. CAMP taught me that when you bring together multiple people from different ethnic backgrounds, cities and professions you need a framework that democratizes and captures the truths that everyone brings to the table.

Design thinking is many things to many people, but for me it’s an opportunity to play at the “edges” not at the “centre”.

Design thinking is many things to many people, but for me it’s an opportunity to play at the “edges” not at the “centre.” Innovation after all happens at the intersection between different schools of thought.

When carried out properly, the tools of design thinking let their practitioners capture the craziest of ideas and merge them into something truly unheard of before.

Throughout CAMP, many of the teams (including our own) struggled with internal conflict. Voices fought to be heard and diversity in experiences led to clashes in ideology. The only real constant was the process. Our team agreed early on to just have faith in the process.

To deliver our Insights Report, we used user centered design to interview users and diverge on the discovery process. We used open questions to grasp insights at the edges and understood that qualitative data was the priority.

Our research revealed that people actively avoided public open spaces if they felt unsafe or lacked transport options. But the places that they loved most about their city were spaces that let them connect with people and nature at the same time. This helped us craft our problem statement:

How might we get more people to engage in public open spaces and create opportunities for businesses to leverage this engagement.

We used a digital whiteboard and post-it notes (via Google Slides) to share insights and affinitise the different patterns that arose. Then we used dotmocracy to vote and discuss the different categories.

In doing so, we were all able to obtain buy-in to the problem we were solving.

Design thinking was crucial to our success. Because whenever we had doubts about the solutions we were forming, we would always come back to the the problem statement that we all genuinely believed in.

Design Thinking enabled us to diverge but also converge together. Something that’s extremely hard to do with five very different people.

3. Problem Solving happens in the Clouds and the Dirt

In the weeks leading up to CAMP’s Sydney Summit, I was listening avidly to Gary Vaynerchuk’s audiobook #AskGaryVee (11/10 would recommend!!!).

I came across this concept of being in the clouds and the dirt. The Clouds is your “why” and your “what,” the Dirt is your “how.” For me it’s the perfect encapsulation of everything I’ve done to help Mad Paws a high-growth, early stage tech startup, succeed.

You’ve got to have this high level strategy, this 10,000 ft view of where your business sits and what the bigger context of everything you do is.

In other words, you’ve got to have your head in the clouds, not in the sand. But it’s not enough, you’ve got to hustle, you’ve got get your hands dirty and get shit done.

For me, from the get go, the most daunting task our group faced as the EY Sustainable Resilient Cities think tank, was the scope of the problem we faced. Design thinkers call this a “wicked problem.”

We didn’t want to be a think tank that just delivered a pretty pitch deck and a whole bunch of high level strategy and concepts. We wanted to deliver a solution that had real user validation and that had the potential to be profitable and scaleable as well.

It’s extremely difficult to pitch a massive problem and convince the audience that your solution is still relevant to that problem.

For us, it was the $800M burden of physical inactivity on the healthcare system. But we brought it back to the opportunities physical activity and engagement in public open spaces brought for local businesses.

I felt many of the teams had identified critical problems to solve, they even had great ideas as concepts. E.g. the first runner’s up Chagri, gave a compelling and super relevant business case for Australian Agricultural businesses exporting to China.

But, the core differentiator (in my opinion) was our dirty work. We got out of the proverbial building and spoke to 41 real customers and 17 real businesses. We hustled and by staying close to the users this allowed me to present a pitch with real learning and real market traction.

4. Surround Yourself with People of the Same “Religion.” Your religion can be a common belief or goal.

This might sound cultish. But I’m convinced that by surrounding yourself with people of the same religion, it truly magnifies and augments you.

This is another concept that came out of Gary’s book. It’s significance only really hit me as I reflected on the CAMP experience. If there’s just one thing that made CAMP worth it for me, it was the people.

Our time on this planet is short. You’ve got to actively pick the people in your life that will accelerate you towards your clouds.

Our time on this planet is short. You’ve got to actively pick the people in your life that will accelerate you towards your clouds. You need to let go of the ones that drag you back.

It reminds me of facilitating Agile Sprint retrospectives at Mad Paws, do less of the things that don’t go well, do more of the things that do.

For CAMP, our religion was the mutual belief that the answer to the world’s biggest problems could only be solved at the intersection of true cultural diversity.

No matter the cultural differences, no matter what our “day jobs” were, we were all here for the same reason.

It speaks to the power of cults. When you surround yourself with people of the same religion, your feel augmented by those around you.

This sounds corny, but you feel like your flying. I am feeling massive surges of oxytocin and serotonin as I write this!

It was an un-describable high and a beautiful, amazing moment of what happens when embracing cultural diversity IS the religion.

For me, one of those highs, was when CAMPers trekked it out to a Karaoke bar in Shanghai. There was this magical moment when Bella (a German Australian) and Will (an Australian, Chinese-Timorese expat living in Shanghai) busted out an old-school Chinese karaoke duet. This was a duet that I had grown up listening to my parents sing.

Then the next second the whole group was singing Wonderwall. It was an un-describable high and a beautiful, amazing moment of what happens when embracing cultural diversity IS the religion. This is a church I can certainly ascribe to.

The CAMPers on Sichuan (aka “Sexual”) Hot Pot Night

5. Pitching = Performing Arts

My final realization was that after 10 years of hip hop dancing, I finally found how to apply it to my professional career.

Throughout CAMP we were blessed to have the guidance of the wonderful ladies of High Performance Coaching. They helped us increase our self-awareness both off the stage and on the stage.

It was to my absolute surprise and delight that both Louise and Karen came from successful careers in the performing arts and here they were coaching executives on performance.

On the afternoon of the final night, we were given tips on how to own the stage, breathe deeply, create presence and show confidence. As I took part in the ritualistic exercises, and stood on the stage in front of an empty set of tables it suddenly occurred to me.

This was no different from the countless other times I had done hip hop performances in front of thousands at a national level.

When I realized that, everything became simple. I understood the need to take the audience on a journey. I understood what it meant to look the judges in the eye and make them believe.

I understood my position on the stage and what moves I needed to perform to maximize impact. And I understood that my word craft and the story I would tell, were already captured in my verbal “muscle memory”. It was zen.

Once I made that quantum leap, I realized the dirt I had been working on for so long, suddenly found a purpose within my clouds.

Up to that moment, I had always questioned the value of dance in my life. It had been a significant emotional burden, when I saw that other people were excelling at other things. I just loved to dance but I couldn’t reconcile it with my own career’s ambitions.

However, once I made that quantum leap, I realized the dirt I had been working on for so long, suddenly found a purpose within my clouds. By connected pitching to performing arts, I knew that the stage that night would be mine (irrelevant if our team won or not).

Our Team’s Winning Pitch

Finishing Up and Giving Thanks

Needless to say, CAMP has been a game-changing milestone in my life.

When I wrote my personal life OKRs at the beginning of 2017, I set myself a personal OKR to organize a networking trip to China.

hen I saw a selfie of Andrea Myles and Jack Ma on LinkedIn which I liked. I received a push notification over the cloud. Andrea reached out and despite how steep the price seemed, I just jumped the gun and went for it. I could not have imagined what would’ve unfolded.

Now, I’m finally seeing how the things that I’ve been doing, my dirt, are connecting up to my destiny, the clouds.