Innovation and internationalisation in a digital world: the focal role of innovation incubators

Riding on the back of the country’s maker movement, Chinese central government launched a ‘mass innovation and mass entrepreneurship’ initiative to promote innovation and entrepreneurship across the country. This top-down initiative has contributed to an explosion of innovation incubators focusing on digital technologies and their broader implications for everyday social and cultural life in a globalised era. In this paper, we explore the focal role of these new breed of Chinese innovation incubators in shaping the internationalisation agenda of firms and how their innovation processes play out in the digital innovation environment. Data for the inquiry comes from ethnographic interviews with loosely coupled actors in the Chinese digital innovation ecosystem and two of the most prominent innovation incubators. We found innovation incubators as orchestrators of a new breed of innovation networks that provide safe crucibles for ‘Maker’ ideation, experimentation, and prototyping. Our study suggests that these Chinese innovation incubators, over time, have come to play an intermediary role in linking Chinese traditional manufacturing industries to digital technologies, capital, and talents. These innovation incubators, by virtue of their extended relational networks, provide opportunities for Chinese firms to tap into international markets otherwise overlooked by their competitors.