Renegades on the Frontier of Innovation: TheShanzhaiGrassroots Communities of Shenzhen in China's Creative Economy

The “Consumption Junction” of ICT in Emerging Markets: An Ethnography of Middlemen

“…Ms. Hua's shop was made possible by the sudden appearance of low-cost, Chinese brands or shanzhai (i.e. pirated) mobile phones in the mid-2000 (Keane & Zhao, 2012), as well as by the lack of regulation (or enforcement of existing regulations) that characterized rural commerce. Her shop did not have a commercial license, it paid no taxes, and the accounting was done by hand in an old school notebook.…”

Researching the Emergence of 3D Printing, Makerspaces, Hackerspaces and FabLabs in the Global South: A Scoping Review and Research Agenda on Digital Innovation and Fabrication Networks

“…In Kenya, it is called jua kali (hot sun) to describe the same principle (Sanderson, 2015). In China, this led local makers to advocate and promote Shanzhai3 (山寨) as a Chinese-centred innovation system (Keane & Zhao, 2012;Lindtner, 2015). www.ejisdc.org…”

“…Co-evolution of the maker movement and Shanzhai innovation4 in China is one of the most discussed and studied maker-related phenomena (Keane & Zhao, 2012;Lindtner, 2014Lindtner, , 2015Lindtner et al, 2015;Saunders & Kingsley, 2016). While Shanzhai was primarily associated with cheap, copycat electronics, the underlying manufacturing system consisted of a horizontal network of producers, traders and vendors operating via informal networks of people who openly share their designs and latest innovations.…”

The Open Innovation Paradigm: from Outsourcing to Open-sourcing in Shenzhen, China

“…The appearance of kits containing a set of parts and a manual (Chien & Wang, 2010) enabled a host of small manufacturers to produce countless models of mobile phones at low cost. These phones are known as shanzhai (Keane & Zhao, 2012;Liang, 2012), that is, midway between counterfeits and originals.…”