US expert: good timing for entrepreneurship to happen in China

China is becoming innovative on a big scale and now is a very good time for entrepreneurship in the country, according to a business educator from the United States.

Entrepreneurship happens when three ingredients are present — talent, ideas and money — and China has a lot of all three, says John Kao, chairman and CEO of EdgeMakers and a former Harvard Business School professor.

Kao was speaking in Beijing this week, sharing entrepreneurship education experiences at an event hosted by the TAL Education Group, a knowledge provider in China.

He said that Chinese people were very pragmatic and motivated to do great things, so there were plenty of opportunities for cooperation in entrepreneurship education between China and the US.

His country, he said, had a good entrepreneurial environment and was enthusiastic about new ideas, while being tolerant of failure.

"The truth is that the attitude toward risk is different from any country in the world, " he said.

There were a lot of people in the US who knew the entrepreneurial process and could give professional advice, he said.

Kao told the event that many people were now talking about the "new currency of competitiveness" and were seeing innovation as the source of economic and social progress. In the past 12 months there were 3.2 billion online searches for the word "innovation".

Kao said he was willing to bring knowledge about innovation and entrepreneurship to China and teach young people to be good innovators.