Innovation in Asian countries is a huge problem. Part of this is Confucian values. I was educated for two years in Taiwan (my dad's company forced us to move, I was the white-washed Asian). Those brutal memories: I had to stay after school and take remedial work in the Chinese brush because I was barely literate, and every time my stroke was wrong the teacher would slam the brush against my fingers. We had to memorize poetry from Tang dynasty. If you missed even one character, you would miss the entire thing. No sissy partial credit.

When I tutored international students from Asia, the largest hurdle was to get them out of this box thinking. They wanted to be told how to write an essay, and they were asking me which side to take because they wanted to agree with the teacher. I said that was your job, that is what the teacher is testing you.

Except, when I read drafts of the essay, it read like a poorly plagiarized text of the history book. I said, you have no argument. You need to take a side. They blamed language difficulties, and I said, even if this were written in Chinese, you have no argument.

The main thing is that Asian countries value system and structure, and view that we stand on shoulders of giants. The problem, though, is they're highly trained and would out beat most US students on the SATs. Platonic systems have spurred a lot of innovation, but again, in the US, our foundations are weak: any moron can think he is genius in the States. The US education system is an interesting beast--it spurs innovation around college, but weak foundations during middle school years

For many industries, good foundations are keys to success. For software, though, you need to be able to be free thinking. Maybe this explains why China copies a lot of our software!