Digitalization and Asia-Pacific Business Models: At the Crossroads of Multiple Cultures, Innovation and Value Creation

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).