experience to pull a company together,” said Lee in a statement. “These barriers all contribute to a dearth of high-tech start-ups in China. Innovation Works is matching entrepreneurs, engineers, ideas, and capital with a unique business model that improves success rates and speeds time-to-market…Through the rigorous development and testing of prototypes, and identification of a ‘founding executive’ to lead the venture, Innovation Works will provide capital, manpower, legal, financial and IT support.”
TechCrunch reports that the plan is to initially hire 100-150 entrepreneurial Chinese engineers, mentor them and cultivate their ideas, and then provide seed funding to spin off roughly half of them each year—replacing those who left with a new wave of recruits.
Lee amplified this idea in an interview with the New York Times. “After one year, we’ll send the companies into the open. If they get venture capital funding—great; if they don’t, they won’t live,” he said.
It was only a matter of time before something like Innovation Works got going in China—and indeed there are no doubt others out there already, if on a smaller scale. Developing nations like China, as they develop, rise ever-higher in the innovation ranks. A few decades ago, China was looking to be the source of cheap manufacturing. Then it moved to higher-end manufacturing, and then to becoming the source of new ideas as big companies like IBM and Microsoft, and much later Google, tapped into its growing talent pool to help create vast R&D operations. Instead of being a place where companies would spin off “localized” versions of U.S. products, China has become a fountainhead of innovation that has spawned products for worldwide use in areas such as wireless, speech recognition and natural language processing, search, graphics, and more.
Lee himself has a long history of helping blaze trails in innovation, but mostly with large corporations. He was born in Taiwan but attended high school and college in the U.S., receiving a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University, where he was widely recognized as developing the first speaker-independent continuous speech-recognition system. After a brief stint teaching at Carnegie Mellon, he moved to Apple, where he worked on early speech recognition products, among other things. Then he moved to SGI, and later was recruited to open Microsoft Research Asia in Beijing. He next shifted to Redmond and became a corporate vice president for Microsoft, where he led teams that developed server products, as well as products in natural language processing and speech that were incorporated into Office and other offerings. In 2005, he suddenly announced he was leaving Microsoft to help lead Google’s operations in China, sparking a contentious legal battle between the two companies that was settled out of court that same year.
