Digitalization and Asia-Pacific Business Models

Book excerpt: 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).