Dragons at Your Door: How Chinese Cost Innovation Is Disrupting Global Competition.

• Author: Marshall, Jeffrey
• Position: Bookshelf - Brief article - Book review

Dragons at Your Door: How Chinese Cost Innovation Is Disrupting Global Competition. By Ming Zeng and Peter J. Williamson. Harvard Business School Press, 240 pages. $29.95.

The potential dangers of the Chinese economic expansion are making news daily, headed by fears of piracy, black-market sales, incessant knockoffs and difficulty in enforcing copyrights or patents.

In Dragons at Your Door, authors Zeng and Williamson take a different tack. "Forget the idea that the rise of Chinese competitors simply means cheap, low-quality imitations flooding world markets," they write. "Chinese companies are starting to disrupt global competition by breaking the established rules of the game. Their tool of choice is cost innovation."

Specifically, they say, this is happening on three distinct fronts: 1) offering customers high technology at low cost; 2) giving customers an unmatched choice of products in traditional mass-market segments...