The very first series of WIM Salon (World Innovators Meet Salon) was set up in Beijing on August 25, under the theme "Innovators Meet in Beijing". Corporate investors who seek opportunities in overseas markets, entrepreneurs who want to hack their growth in the Chinese market, and countless innovative minds joined the event.

Panel Discussion: "Dare to Innovate"

The event held a truely cosmopolitan panel discussion with four distinguished guests who have shared their innate innovative mind-set with the audience. Zoon Ahmed Khan, researcher and journalist based at the Belt and Road Strategy Institute, Tsinghua University, moderated the event. 

Alvaro Montoya, Co-founder of Akkadu, shared how he decided to start translation business and the way he survives in the brutal competition of China: where giant companies with enormous financial, technical and operational capacity operating in the same field.

Akkadu, a platform that enables live translation streaming by combining human and AI to interpret events, is a product of Alvaro's years-long adventure starting-off Barcelona. 

Iconic leaders are the people with good stories behind, and Alvaro is one of those people with good stories. Once he finds himself in the same car with Huawei's phenomenal CEO, Ren Zhengfei, in Barcelona, when the time Huawei has not yet to be a global behemoth. 

'Why don't you learn Chinese?' said Mr Zhengfei. His words were powerful, I booked the tickets and went to China to study the language. This is where it all started" says Alvaro. 

He had done his MBA in China's Ivy league School, Tsinghua University, and realised that the professors were not speaking English when they supposed to. Alvaro had challenges understanding them and developed his first translation product. "An innovative entrepreneur is somebody who provides solutions to problems, and I haven't done anything else," says Alvaro. 

Paddy Robertson, Founder and CEO of Smart Air, a social enterprise based in China, and providing solutions for the Air Pollution from its offices in India, Mongolia, Philippines and others. Yet, the competition he is facing is as harsh as Alvaro's: Paddy needs to compete with the world biggest IoT provider in China, Xiaomi.

'Challenging the status-quo' is what it means to be an entrepreneur for me," says Paddy. 

"As a social entrepreneur, our value is beyond the numbers," he adds. 

While the global consensus on climate change and environmental policies have yet to be formed, Smart Air's solutions are indeed, beyond valuable. The Asian economics is being reshaped, and pollution is shifting away from China to the emerging markets in the region, including among others, Bangladesh, India and Vietnam. The unmet need for Smart Air's solutions' is keep growing, and Paddy seems to be sure of what he is doing. 

Yingying Li (李莹莹), the founder of Yingfluence, specialized in cross-cultural communication. She introduced the concept "Cultural Intelligence (CQ)" and explained why she thinks "there could never be enough bridges".

Yingfluence provides cross-boundary management consulting services, mainly in the US, China and Latin America, where Yingying possess a wide network with entrepreneurs and policy-makers.

China, stands at the center of global paradigm shift, and enterprises need to 'think out of the box' in this super-flexible international atmosphere. We are bulding the necessary bridges and letting them think out of the box in Yingfluence. 

Management consulting, particularly cross-border consulting, is yet another maturing business field in China. While some of the enterprises from the West have been operating in the area for more than 150 years, Chinese management consulting firms have yet to started to form along with China's financial opening-up after the 1980s. Yingfluence's services are standing at the heart of this ever-emering area.