Innovation Summit 2017 Asia | The Economist | 21 September 2017 | Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Innovation Summit: Asian innovation in a drawbridge-up world will bring together a diverse group of C-suite executives and business leaders keen to develop their own innovation practices and learn from those who have achieved success in innovating to boost profits and create value.

For decades, Asian economies have benefited from expanding globalisation, free trade and growing global markets. Today, this tradition of openness looks shaky. Many of the region’s great trading partners are flirting with populist anti-trade policies and threatening to pull up their drawbridges on the world.

Business leaders must now rethink their assumptions about the global state of play and renew their efforts to innovate. For many, innovation will be the only source of new opportunities in a “drawbridge-up” world.

Are companies looking closer to home, within the region, for new ideas and customers? What role can multinationals play in keeping minds and markets open as anti-globalisation sentiment sours the appetite for trade? Can Asia, and China in particular, exploit the growing closed-door mentality in the West and take leadership of global markets?

Asia must build on its strengths by adopting savvy policies and regulations that support entrepreneurial risk taking. For China’s world-beating e-commerce platforms and hardware industry, India’s booming tech start-up sector and South-East Asia’s burgeoning social-media scene, innovation will be crucial to future growth.

The Economist Events' Innovation Summit 2017 will discuss what’s next for Asia’s innovators. How are technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) affecting the bottom line of businesses using them today? Can technology-led markets keep driving development if Asia’s manufacturing sector contracts? Has hardware become the new software? And where does the next generation of entrepreneurs see Asia’s future opportunities?

Participants at the Innovation Summit will be a diverse group of C-suite executives and business leaders keen to develop their own innovation practices and learn from those who have achieved success in innovating to boost profits and create value.

Vijay Vaitheeswaran
China business editor and Shanghai bureau chief, The Economist

Tom Standage
Deputy editor, The Economist

Christopher Clague
Senior editor, content solutions, The Economist Intelligence Unit