Haier: Incubating Entrepreneurs in a Chinese Giant

CEO Zhang Ruimin must plan how to accelerate the growth of self-managed microenterprises. Platforms were Haier’s business platforms operating in five major sectors: white goods transformation, investment and incubation, financial holdings, real estate, and cultural industry. Platform owners incubated microenterprises on their platforms with the resources Haier had, but they were not the supervisors of microenterprises. His goal was to tear down the walls between the organization, shortening the time the company took to respond to users’ needs, with the ultimate goal of “zero distance” between employees and users. Haier had engaged in a series of organizational changes since 2005, the most recent of which started in 2012. His latest experimentation was turning Haier into a platform for entrepreneurship. Employees and those outside Haier could set up microenterprises on Haier’s platforms. Zhang thought Haier was on the right track, but the model had to prove itself in practice. He set a timetable: the microenterprises must reach the tipping point by September 20, 2018, which meant the microenterprise would have become a platform to which all resource providers would flock and stay loyal. There was no precedent of transformation like this anywhere. Would Haier succeed? What could Haier do to push the microenterprises to get to the tipping point?