Shameen Prasantham on How Chinese startups learned to dance with gorilla businesses

Hello and welcome to the Rich Robinson Show. I'm your host, Rich Robinson. Over the past 25 years, I've been an entrepreneur, investor, advisor, and professor here in Asia. After nearly a quarter of a century in China, I'm now based here in Bali, Indonesia, the island Of the gods. Asia is my home now. 60% of the world's population also lives here, but I would contend 80% of the world's dynamism and opportunity is right here in the region. On the show, you'll hear candid and fun conversations with some of my friends and colleagues, people I've met along my journey, entrepreneurs, operators, experts, It will help you unlock actionable insights around the Asia region and the entrepreneurial agility that actually defines it. This first season, season 1 of The Rich Robinson Show, is titled At the Speed of China. Like, wait for it, at the speed of light. Things happen fast in China, and in this season 1, we're gonna take a deeper look at that. The rapid economic development over the past few decades, as well as the speed and cycles of innovation taking place all day, every day, right now.

Let's go, Jio! So as we were talking about, that title is just fantastic: Gorillas. Can Dance, like a really solid business book with such a fun title. Thank you so much for coming on the pod. A renowned professor. I've heard his name from so many different channels in China, CEIBS Business School, and joining us on the pod. Thank you so much, Shamin, for coming on.

Thank you, Rich. It's a real pleasure to join you on this podcast. Likewise, I've heard so much about you and this podcast has got So much traction. So it's a real honor to be on it.

Yeah. Your new book is called Gorillas Can Dance. So let's dance a little bit. And before we dance about this topic, take us back to your journey to Shanghai, how you ended up there and like what you've been studying along the way. And then let's lead up to that and we can really dive deeper into the book.

Super. Yeah. So I'm originally from India, born to an Indian father and Portuguese, Sri Lankan mother. And before I turned 1, we lived in the United States for some time. My parents were at grad school. And basically my dad, who's still alive, continues to be heavily involved in an NGO that focuses on counseling, psychological counseling. And so at this point in time, it's actually kept very busy. Unfortunately, he's still going, just completed. 50 years at that NGO in the summer. But eventually I ended up in Scotland and that's where a lot of my ideas around corporations partnering with startups developed. So Scotland is a very interesting context in the sense that there are a large number of small entrepreneurial firms. It has a very strong tradition of engineering and so on. But it also has a bunch of multinational subsidiaries that set up shop, some of them as long ago as the 1950s, in the period after the Second World War, when Europe was rebuilding and American companies started moving over to Europe using the UK as a beachhead. So many of them, the commercial offices were down in London, but the manufacturing facilities were up in Scotland where you had a qualified workforce, but it was In relative terms, less expensive. And by the '90s, I was sort of in the mix and I was lucky enough to be part of an international business unit at Strathclyde University run by 2 eminent international business professors, Neil Hood and Stephen Young. They had spent decades by then looking at these big multinational companies operating there. But then there was also this emergence of a new phenomenon of smaller companies going international. And a lot of doctoral students were looking at that. And I sort of was maybe number 6 or 7 in a line of doctoral students. And eventually I began to ask the question, why are we looking at these 2 phenomena in parallel? The big companies on the one hand, the small companies on the other. And as it happened at that moment, Neil Hood, who had 2 hats, he was an academic on the one hand, but also a policymaker. He was deputy chairman of Scottish Enterprise. He said, funny you should say that because we're seeing these American companies that originally came to do manufacturing now under a lot of pressure because they can't compete with Central and Eastern Europe and certainly not with China. They want to up their game and innovate more. And we've always had these smaller companies that have been innovative but want to scale up. And we're actually trying to help them come together. And so that was just a very unique opportunity for me to observe that phenomenon. And that summer I went to a conference in America, an academic conference, and asked another very eminent strategy professor, what do you think about this possibility that small companies and large companies might work together? So by now this is 2006, 15 years ago. And he said, well, I don't think small companies have a choice. They need to learn to dance with the big gorilla. And that's what gave rise to this idea of Dancing with Gorillas. And a couple of years later, I had an article in California Management Review with Julian Birkinshaw of London Business School. And then over time, I was in Scotland and it was great to be in the West and observe what was happening in the US. But I also became aware that there was so much happening in Asia, in emerging economies. And so in 2011, 10 years ago, I joined Nottingham University's campus in Ningbo. And then 6 years ago, moved over to CEIBS in Shanghai in 2015. And so I've been very lucky to observe this phenomenon of big companies and startups partnering over a period of time and in different parts of the world.

Excellent.

Wow.

Very nicely laid out journey to what your expertise has been built around and what you've just written. Tell some of the listeners about CEIBS and that school and what the acronym stands for and What's the secret sauce behind that institution?

Right. So CEIBS stands for China Europe International Business School. It was founded in 1944 as a joint venture of the European Union and the Shanghai Municipal Corporation. And so really it is 2 government entities coming together to create this business school. And with the Chinese economy having opened up in the late '70s, there was actually a pent-up demand for managerial talent. And this was a place that from the beginning aspired to have a very high quality MBA program. And initially there were professors flying in from the West. And then subsequently over time, Chinese origin professors were trained in the US typically, made their way to Hong Kong. And then we're seeing this very interesting school developing. And so in a very short period of time, less than 3 decades, it sort of developed a global reputation. The full-time MBA program has been ranked in the top 10 by the Financial Times for the last 4 years. The global EMBA program is ranked number 2 worldwide. But we have a very big Chinese EMBA program as well. And I would say the alumni from that has just been a tremendous resource. And just to contrast management education in China with how it is in India, for example, the Indian economy opened up in 1991, over a decade after China did. But the first business school was set up in the 1960s, Indian Institute of Management, in collaboration with Harvard Business School. And a few developed like that before 1991 were very prominent. And so in a sense, you had an oversupply of managerial talent in an economy that hadn't quite opened up and liberalized, whereas here was the other way around. And I think CEIBS has just grown with the economy and I think has that unique characteristic of among Chinese business schools being very international and among its global peers having this specialism in China.

Thanks for sharing. Yeah. Interesting contrasting it back to India. It's really been fascinating to watch, especially in the last decade, how many kick-ass Indian executives and entrepreneurs have really dominated the U.S. business landscape, right? I'm such a big fan of Satya and what he's done with Microsoft could have easily Gone the way of the dinosaur, and it's really become this very innovative, very nimble, fascinating company. And of course, at Google and Coke and so on, right? So I hadn't really thought of that. The management schools have been around, and the business culture and the internationalization of business from India—that's really informed what's happened in the U.S. Interesting. And yeah, tell me about the experience of teaching in China, Ningbo, Shanghai versus.

Nottingham versus Scotland versus, you know, others? Well, I mean, I think it's a privilege to be in the line of work I am. I've just enjoyed both the research and teaching sides from the beginning, but there's a big contrast. I remember noticing how quiet the campus was on a Saturday night in Ningbo, where in Glasgow at the same time of the week, it's mayhem inside, you know, down south. So I thought that was one of the first things I observed. And so these are very different audiences in Ningbo and Shanghai. In Ningbo, there's a big undergraduate program and also a few master's programs for people, pre-experienced master's. And so these were typically younger students. I would teach them in year 4 in Ningbo, the undergrad students. I found them very bright, very hardworking. In Shanghai at CEIBS, the full-time MBA program is our youngest cohort. The average age is 29. So these are sort of older students, but then we have even older part-time students who come in on the executive MBA programs. And so moving to Shanghai and engaging with people with more experience was also great. And coming here in 2015, I think I just got very lucky. So I arrived in Ningbo in 2011. Right after the GDP growth rate of China had dipped, notice that, and this was, I think, partly because the stimulus that had been unleashed during the financial crisis was now being reined back. And some of my friends in the UK were saying, mate, you got this timing completely wrong. You hung around here while we were suffering with the financial crisis and you went there just in time for the slowdown. But what we know now, which I didn't No, then that was also the year WeChat was introduced. Yes. Yeah. But I think it was also, yeah, the beginning of a new chapter, the rise of mobile. 2015, right after Premier Li Keqiang announced mass innovation, mass entrepreneurship in 2014. And I arrived in a city where I think the presence of multinational companies is one of its defining characteristics in terms of the business life.

Yeah.

And so while it doesn't quite have the entrepreneurial ecosystem of Beijing or Shenzhen or even Hangzhou in a way, what they did have was the opportunity to facilitate large multinationals engaging with entrepreneurship. And I couldn't have asked for a better venue in a sense to continue observing the phenomenon that I had been.

Yeah. What a fantastic playground for you in some ways, right? Because if you're going to really talk about Gorillas can dance. Yeah. You got to really work with the gorillas because everybody else will come, right? Kind of like a dating app. You got to seed it with females and then all the males will follow. Right. And if we're going to talk about corporations, you don't get a bunch of startups and wait for the corporations to show up. It's the other way around. So, wow. Fascinating. I love it. Tell me a little bit about some of the anecdotes and some of the things that you've experienced talking to multinationals in China and startups, like the trials and tribulations and triumphs of those relationships?

Sure. So let me start with Microsoft, which in many ways is the lead case in my book, simply because it's the company I've studied the longest. And you mentioned Satya. So over 15 years ago, the first company that I was getting a feel outside of Scotland in terms of showing some interest in engaging with startups was Microsoft. And that was serendipity, the way I was able to connect with them, but then I stayed in touch and kept observing what they were doing. And in 2008, they used this startup partnering program called BizSpark, which was in a way an attempt to give away free software to combat the open software movement because they wanted startups to build, continue to build stuff on their platform. And then this was followed by a more elite invitee, by invitation only program for the 100 most innovative of these 30,000 BizPark members. And I remember going to what they call the BizPark One Summit in Mountain View. I was still in Scotland at the time. So I went across the Atlantic and it was striking that almost all the startups in the room were North American or Western European. There were many Asians based in Silicon Valley who were running those startups, but there wasn't a single Chinese startup there. And there was maybe one Indian startup that had flown over from Bangalore. But what also happened shortly after that, so this was 2010. In 2011, I went to the Worldwide Partner Conference of Microsoft in LA, 15,000 people come, coming together. And some of those startups from BizSpark 1 were being showcased there. And this newly appointed president of the server and business tools division stands up and gives a speech about how he thinks cloud computing was going to be important. And this meant that these startups that they'd begun to be engaging with became all the more important because cloud computing was sort of perfect for these startups who didn't want to invest a lot in infrastructure. And that was, of course, Satya Nadella. And so by the time I had come to, arrived in Shanghai, Satya had actually already taken over as CEO. And what was interesting to observe was that partnering with startups was not peripheral for these, for a company like this. It was becoming more and more mainstream and connected to the core strategy. And what had also happened in that period between that speech he made in 2011 and my getting to Shanghai in 2015 was a very interesting develop— development that was triggered from Israel. So the guys in Microsoft Israel, when they heard about the BizPark One startup initiative, started directing some of their startups to participate. And at one point, I think the largest number of startups from any single country outside of the West was from Israel. But they said, well, let's take things one step further. And in 2012, corporate accelerator for startups in Tel Aviv, in their R&D center, and sort of inspired their colleagues in Beijing. There's an R&D center in Zhongguancun and their colleagues in the R&D center in Bangalore to do likewise. And so in 2012, the first Microsoft Accelerators were opened in Israel, India, and China, and only in the couple of years after that in the West. And so this was a complete reversal. When I'd gone to Mountain View just a couple of years before 2012, it was mainly Western startups. But by the time I came to Shanghai, it was very clear that they were very interested in engaging with startups in the emerging markets as well. So that was something that has been very interesting to observe, that large multinationals have the opportunity to play in different playgrounds and can tap into this entrepreneurial talent. The other thing that I'd like to mention is that after I came to Shanghai, when I made my first presentation based on this research that had been developing over some time, the people that came and spoke to me afterward were people from automotive multinationals, banking companies, and so on. And I began to observe a shift whereby now traditional companies were also beginning to engage with startups. And one of the companies that I came to know was BMW, who had launched a BMW Startup Garage program in 2015 in Munich. And eventually I went up over to Munich and I met Gregor Gimme, who was one of the co-founders of this program. He was originally from Germany, spent time in Silicon Valley, including in IDEO, came back to Germany, joined BMW, and ended up helping kickstart this program. And we were sitting in this really funky corporate accelerator type room, and I complimented him on it, and he said, And all this design and everything, I just went ahead and did it without getting approval from the corporate identity department. And he said, even the website, we went ahead and did this because if you did it the usual way, you would have a banner right on the top where you could click on and you could buy a BMW car. That's how apparently all the BMW websites were. And he said that wouldn't work for a startup audience. And he said the day after this was launched, he got a phone call from corporate and identity, and he thought he was in trouble, but in fact, they called to congratulate him for a cool website. And so it was rather than what I lost. That was exactly what he said. He said, what I'd learned in Silicon Valley was you ask for forgiveness, not permission. That's exactly it. So I think. It's been very interesting to observe over time and in different places, companies trying to figure this out. And my point with both the Microsoft and the BMW examples is that it's not been easy. It's not necessarily happened overnight, but, you know, it's been very interesting that companies have recognized that they don't need to do everything. They can tap into entrepreneurial energy and talent that's outside of the boundaries of their organization.

Wonderful. Thanks for sharing. Yeah. I mean, at face value, startups don't have any brand equity or really any users or really many resources when they start out. And large organizations have plenty of users, brand equity, and resources, but they're slow, not very nimble, and not necessarily thinking innovatively. And startups are fast and nimble and are always thinking of core principles and first principles. So it should work together. But I think I've seen so many examples of innovation theater or just a dog and pony show to check the boxes, but I think it's really starting to happen now. And what are some of the examples that you can share where, you know, 1+ 1= 11?

You are just so absolutely right. On paper, sounds like a perfect match. Each side has something the other wants. One has scale, the other has agility. Yet in reality, it's a challenge. And in fact, that's one of the key things I talk about in the book, this what I call the paradox of asymmetry. The very differences that make these companies attracted to each other make it difficult to work together, or at least not straightforward.

Are we talking about my first marriage or are we talking about your book? I'm sorry.

So I think the key and the companies that have done this well, better than others, because as you very rightly said, although it appears that many gorillas have been attempting to dance, learning to dance. Some of them have taken it more seriously than others. And the ones that have taken it seriously have consciously or unconsciously, I think, unpacked what these asymmetries are and sought to address these. And so I identified 3 different asymmetries. The first is the asymmetry of goals. Big and small companies want somewhat different things and at different timescales. The second is the asymmetry of structure, which is Perhaps the most obvious, much, much larger multilayered versus these small flat organizations. How do you find role counterparts between the two? And then there is what I call the asymmetry of attention. The big company sees a sea of startups out there and they don't know which startups are worthy of their attention, of their limited managerial attention. The startups know who the big companies are, but they struggle to know whose attention within the big company. Because I've seen some startups waste 3 to even 6 months just going from pillar to post, trying to find the right individuals to connect with. And so the companies that have done this well, I think, have sort of clarified what the synergy is to address that asymmetry of goals, have created interfaces to deal with the structural problem and provide a first port of call for the startups. And have also very actively cultivated exemplars of success stories so people can see where the attention should go. Now, if you think of these interfaces, I've identified 2 broad types, one that I call cohorts and the other that I call funneled. Cohorts are like an MBA class. Getting in is difficult, but once you get in, unless you screw up, you will finish the time-bound program. But the interaction with peers is very important. And I think that's what the corporate accelerator model has been. It's been sort of bringing together a cohort of startups for 3 to 4 years. Here, it's impossible not to mention Microsoft again. I think they have done this with a lot of diligence and effort to try to make this work. But there have been other interesting corporate accelerators, including ones that have Engage with third parties. So the Barclays accelerator in London and New York working with Techstars has been an interesting example of this. The other is what I call funnels where startups get screened in order to find a small set of startups that can contribute to the objectives of the company, a bit like the job search process after the MBA. You may not even know who else is involved. And BMW's startup garage has been along those lines, they may want to improve cybersecurity, for example, or autonomous driving, and then they may start startups and end up working with a handful. So Unilever Foundry is another company that had developed a funnel-based approach. And what's interesting is many of these companies now do things in the West as well as in emerging markets and have developed, discovered that there are certain unique opportunities here. in emerging economies and have sought to tap into the great entrepreneurial talent that you've talked about in many of your podcasts and writings.

And do you have any examples of something that's happened specifically in China? I know that you broadly look at global companies.

Yeah.

So, you know, one of the high moments in my research journey came in April 2019 when I was brought into a room. To talk about my research very briefly as the opening piece in a 90-minute session. And sitting in the audience was Doug McMillon, CEO of Walmart. So on this very brief visit that he had in China, the Walmart China team decided that it was worth him spending 90 minutes of his time learning about something called the Omega-8 program that Walmart China had introduced. To engage with Chinese startups, and so after my talk, there were three startups that demoed what they were doing and so on. And I thought these were great examples. One of the hassles that pain points in a supermarket is when you're trying to buy loose vegetables or fruit, you have to put it in a plastic dicer, plastic bag, then get in a line, wait for an IE to put it on weighing scales, and then when you're waiting in line, someone cuts the That was my ex-mother-in-law that cut you, by the way.

I just wanted to let you know.

So Walmart basically put this out as a sort of an innovation challenge. And this one startup from Shenzhen developed, used image recognition technology. It's an AI startup to develop a one-click solution whereby when you put this plastic bag with vegetable or fruit on the weighing scale, 4 or 5 images come up of possible And you clip one and then you get a little sticky bit of paper with the QR, the barcode, and you wrap it around your—

How much of our life have we like, oh sure, they don't know what number it is in every language. In, in where I live now, people like, cause it's really a Byzantine system where there's a 3-digit code and then you bring over some vegetable they've never seen before. And they're like, I don't even know. Right. That's brilliant.

Right. And if it came up in Chinese characters, I wouldn't be able to read it because I can't read Hanzi very well. So. it would work even for me. And here was the really interesting thing. Walmart China was so impressed by this that they shared this with their international colleagues. And of course, Doug McMillon himself got to see this in person. And they ended up using this Shenzhen-based startup's technology in the US, but to address a different pain point, which was in-store tech.

Oh, interesting. Leakage.

And so to me, this was, I thought, a very interesting way for a Western multinational tapping into a Chinese startup, not only to solve a local problem, but also leveraging, harnessing this back home as well.

Wow. Excellent. Yeah, really good example. And that's something that's a true pain point and it brings together a lot of like new technology and ideas and not necessarily something that's going to be homegrown. So. What's your position or like, how does all of this sort of dancing with external partners, how does that work with some sort of internal innovation effort or ambitions internally? Like what's the sort of kind of optimal balance between those in your research?

That's a great question because this is in fact one of the challenges of open innovation more generally, as Henry Chesbrough terms of the notion that you can engage with outside parties, be they universities, other collaborators, or startups, is that we have this problem of the not invented here syndrome and a resistance to things coming from the outside because it might seem like an indictment of the shortcomings on the inside. But I think more and more companies are recognizing that you need to have both. You can't be completely reliant on external Innovation sources, but at the same time, you don't need to do everything inside. Obviously, there's some element of competition that's likely to happen as a result. But I think one of the advantages of engaging with startups on the outside is speed, which is one of the themes you emphasize greatly. So I've even heard of one company where there were a couple of internal guys who joined an intrapreneurship and they. They made some progress, but not as fast as they'd have liked. Quit the company, develop their startup, and the original company they worked for eventually acquired the startup. So there is some advantage to be had with engaging with startups on the outside. And in fact, you don't want to strangle them or their speed. But on the other hand, they aren't going to be the solution to everything. And so one interesting example I came across in Shanghai was. intrapreneurship program of Intel China, which was originally called Ideas to Reality, and it's been rechristened Growth X to make clear that these internal teams of managers who get brought into this program are meant to come up with projects that use Intel technology that will help to grow their revenue. But one of the things that Kapil Kane, the director of innovation—

I know Kapil well. What a terrific guy. He's like, Perfectly suited to run that program. It's great. Yeah. I've seen your interview with him. Yeah, it's great.

Right. So one of the interesting things Kapil discovered was with one project that they were looking for a business unit within Intel to adopt. It occurred to him that a startup in Hangzhou, which was into making smart doors, would actually be a good fit. And by partnering with that startup, the product went to market in 3 months as opposed to 9 months, what it would have likely taken. And so going forward, they actually then started inviting external startups to join this GrowthX program. And I think the last time they did it, they must've had something like 10 or 12 internal teams, but 5 external startups as well. And I thought that's a very interesting way to cross-fertilize ideas from the outside and inside the tech company.

Yeah, indeed. Interesting. And so Intel, of course, US-based corporation, long history, lots of success in China. Have you felt or smelt like local Chinese multinationals, like their ability to be a little bit more fast or nimble or innovative or flexible versus international companies within the scope of your research? Do you have any examples around that at all?

So I have mainly focused on Western multinationals in my research. But it is clear that anywhere in the world, if you're operating outside your home base, it isn't that easy to move as fast because you don't necessarily have all the decision-making power. Over time, I've seen Western multinational subsidiaries in China recognizing that you need to move quickly, give more autonomy. But nevertheless, there are some constraints. So no doubt the local Technology giants, and many of them engage with startups. They have the ability to move very fast. But actually, I heard something very interesting from one Chinese startup entrepreneur who had lived in the West, come back. In fact, not long after Mass Innovation, Mass Entrepreneurship was launched, and he said, "Hey, I look at it. I need to dance with both sets of gorillas, so I need to dance with the." Western gorillas and the Chinese dragon. But I think I'd much rather talk to Microsoft initially and try and get into their accelerator and get to a point where I feel strong enough to then start talking to the Chinese big boys. And I think one of the things that's very noticeable about Chinese large companies is the amount of investing they do. So I think there was a study that came out a couple of years ago that showed maybe 5% of the entire Silicon Valley VC funding sources came from corporates, but in China was something like 40%. And so to have BAT as one of the investors, something that many entrepreneurs have feared or wanted, but many have seen as inevitable. So definitely there's, I think, a very different sense in terms of what those Chinese companies have to offer than Western ones. But from a startup's point of view, I think in many cases it's been feasible to try and get the best of both worlds.

Yeah, very interesting. I think, yeah, when you're talking about BAT, Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, and then there's also Yuan and JD and ByteDance and many others. I think both Alibaba and Tencent learned early on because those companies are actually kind of long in the tooth. They're both. Founded in the late '90s, they're almost a quarter of a century old, but they're still much more nimble, typical multinational, and they're very aggressive in investing and making a lot of bets and just being at arm's length and just letting all these flowers bloom or not bloom. And in some ways they can be a kingmaker and say, ah, we're going to give our users and resource to you and benight you in some ways. So maybe for them, they're just doing their sort of like innovation. They just kind of broadly know this industry is growing and let's plant a lot of seeds there and then we can do follow-on rounds and then maybe acquire them. But I think other multinationals, it's probably not quite as feasible to be so aggressive. And also their DNA is not necessarily in consumer tech. So yeah, it really is important to be able to do this dance. And what do you sort of hope from this book? Like what do you think is really the sort of end goal for for corporations to really be able to internalize? Like, this is a book both for large startups, but also a guidebook for some large multinationals, but also startups to be able to engage with them.

Well, I would say that the primary audience is the large multinational managers in large corporations, the gorillas. And so there are lessons that can be learned from other gorillas that have sought to partner effectively with startups. But I would hope that startup entrepreneurs who do want to dance with gorillas will increase their odds of success by understanding better the perspective of the big gorillas and can adapt accordingly. So when I was talking about clarifying synergies, creating interfaces, and cultivating exemplars, if that's what these big companies are doing, then a startup wanting to partner with them should accordingly form, consolidate, and extend their relationship, keeping these in mind. And for the small startups, my advice has always been to take a twofold approach. On the one hand, be as proactive and put your best foot forward kind of thing. But on the other hand, be cautious, be careful. I think that expression dancing with gorillas resonated with so many because there's a hint of danger there. You can be So to be honest, the book is written to the managers of large corporations, but it can hopefully also be relevant to startups. And just to make a couple of points in terms of what I hope this will deliver. Now, on the one hand, I hope it will help to make collaboration more effective, but also in a way that's entrepreneurial and keeping in mind the global perspective. And that last point. Is worth mentioning because globalization has sort of gone out of fashion. Entrepreneurship, though, is still very much seen as hot, important. And I think that's right and true, but I think still there is a place for a global mindset. A lot of these connections happen locally, but as I mentioned in the case of that Walmart illustration, Walmart didn't have a global mindset. They wouldn't have Engage with a startup so far from home, and it wouldn't have been open to the possibility that learning could be taken elsewhere. So these three mindsets—the entrepreneurial mindset, a collaborative mindset, and a global mindset—I think if you sort of take a step back, applies well beyond corporates and startups working together. And where I think these minds can also make a difference is in terms of social impact. And that's the other thing. That I hope will be one of the key things we'll take away. And this came home to me because my school, Sieves, has had a campus in Africa for over a decade. So 2015, when I joined Sieves, it was a year after Mass Innovation, Mass Entrepreneurship. So it was interesting from that point of view, but also September 2015 was when the United Nations adopted the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. And right after that, I started engaging with Africa, our Africa campus, because I would go and teach regularly and then try and do some fieldwork for my research while I was there. And in fact, one of the multinationals I came across engaging with entrepreneurs in Africa is Alibaba. One of my former students joined that, their founders program where they, through engaging with startups in various developing Countries, and it occurred to me that many of the student projects that I was hearing—you know—ideas for new startups, social entrepreneurship was a redundant term. All entrepreneurship was social. They would say we don't have regular power supply, hence this solar energy startup idea. We can't get loans easily, hence this microfinance startup idea. And so when corporates, including Microsoft and Alibaba. Were engaging with startups there, there was not only economic payoff, but also social impact. And the 2020s are meant to be the decade of action to help us accelerate the achievement of the SDGs by 2030. And then the pandemic arrived in 2020, which means this decade is going to be even more crucial, but more challenging. The 17th of the 17 SDGs is Partnerships for the Goals. And I think the coming together of non-traditional allies, including corporates, startups, multilateral organizations like the United Nations, NGOs, you know, this is what's going to help to a large extent to help us make progress. And that's the note I end the book on. And so in addition to corporate innovation becoming more effective, which I certainly hope will be the case, I hope this broader perspective on social impact will also be noted. And that's something I try, a point I try to make with my students as well, because they are the sort of future of corporate China. And I think that's going to be very crucial.

Terrific. Excellent. Wow. Excellent way to end the book and excellent way to wrap up our chat as well too. So we've not met in person, but as advertised indeed. Thank you, Shamin. Thank you, Professor. It's really a pleasure. And I don't have to say good luck with the book. I know it's going to do super well. It's very timely. And in addition to the awesome title, it's something that I think the ecosystem will hungrily devour.

Oh, you're very kind. And it's been a tremendous pleasure. I can't believe that we actually haven't met in person before because we know so many people in common. And I've come across your work for a long time. So this was a real pleasure. If I may include a shameless plug, anybody interested to learn more, there's a website called www.gorillascandance.com. And you'll get more information about it.

Fantastic. Wonderful. Thank you, sir. All the best and have a great weekend. And thank you.

Thank you so much. Likewise, Rick.

Thank you.

That's a wrap. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Rich Robinson Show, Season 1, At the Speed of China. Visit therichrobinson.com/show to smash that subscribe button. Please also go to iTunes or whatever platform of choice, rate and comment. And until next time, thank you very much. Say, Jen, cheers, y'all.