Asia continues to deliver technological innovations par excellence to the global community. Such is the unprecedented growth of Asian enterprise that more people are moving to cities, effectively expanding one metropolis after another. This has the effect of rapid and widespread urbanization with an estimated 50% + of Asian people now living in cities. No other continent on the planet boasts as many megacities as Asia, at 17 and growing fast. The implications of this urbanization are unprecedented.

For starters, the paradigm shift from rural to urban has spawned a new economic class of people, and its affecting every facet of Asian life. A thriving cultural milieu now embraces Asia, and it is expanding outwards at a rate of knots. This means that Asian enterprise and innovation are deeply entrenched in the psyche of countries across the region. This spans China, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, Thailand, Taiwan, India, Philippines and well beyond. The mass migration of people into urban areas brings with it a myriad of opportunities for new concepts, exciting ideas, and cultural growth.

This type of change comes with many challenges. Existing infrastructures are being placed under immense pressure to accommodate ever-growing numbers of people. Power grids, sanitation systems, roads and highways, housing markets, transportation facilities and so forth must grow rapidly to keep pace with these changes. Asian imaginative flair is up to the challenge, with a series of featured innovations designed to foster growth, support massive urbanization, and enhance productivity like never before. The indomitable Asian enterprises – the juggernauts of global commerce – are able to extract the best from their employees, thanks to participative styles of management, innovative idea generation through top-tier open innovation platforms, and greater efficiency across the board. Such is the broad mindedness of Asian enterprise that many exciting new processes, systems, and innovations are now available. In 2016, Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) launched its Watt A Box idea. This was a limited-edition concept designed to help users with mobile phone charging. The KFC box doubles as a take-out box and a phone charger replete with USB cable and lithium-ion battery. It was released in Mumbai and Delhi in India, and proved to be a resounding success at the time.

Safety first in Asia

Chinese on-demand taxi company Didi Chuxing has always operated on the cutting edge, much like Uber and Lyft. 2 years ago, this company launched a safety feature known as an SOS button via its app. With so much congestion in Asia, and so much demand for transportation, drivers tend to rush all over the place, endangering their passengers. To prevent such reckless activity, this ride service placed another consumer-friendly feature on the app. The company gets alerted every time a rider feels at risk. Much like its US-based counterpart Uber, Didi Chuxing also allows riders to share their itinerary with friends and family who can then monitor the trip in real time. The security measures came about after a female passenger was murdered by one of the drivers.

Safety is a big issue across Asia, and for good reason. Thailand is home to many reported incidents of violence against women. However, one makeup company – Oriental Princess – is having none of it. It perfected a product known as Lip Rescue. The lipstick dovetails as an alert system when the user blows into it. It emits a 120 dB high pitched sound which can be heard within a radius of 100 m. With an estimated 3 attacks against women every minute, Thailand certainly benefits from this innovation.

Making Space in Densely Populated Cities

Cities like Tokyo, Singapore, Beijing, Mumbai and others face a major problem when it comes to space. People live on top of one another in high-rise apartments, often in pokey apartments. To combat this problem, companies across Japan and beyond have pooled their collective talents to conjure up workable solutions. One such company, Yves Behar in tandem with MIT Media Lab has crafted robotic furniture for micro--sized apartments. Known as Ori, this smart furniture features units that dovetail as bookshelves, beds, tables and the like. They are all fully programmable via an app, and allow for maximum space utilization. Tokyo is not alone in this, other major cities like Singapore have partnered with major multinational enterprises like 3M to create noise cancelling construction materials. These initiatives are but a handful of the many exciting innovations currently underway across Asia.

Language: it is the hidden side of globalization, the less glamorous but often crucial piece of a company’s globalization strategy.

As companies like Huawei and Amazon gone global, they have relied more and more on localization companies to internationalize their products and services. In turn, localization companies have had to innovate the tools they use to accommodate this new demand.

Stepes, a chat-based messaging app, aims to give the localization and translation industry with a much-needed boost while making translation more accessible to both translators and businesses.

“Localization is so much more than translation,” explains Carl Yao, an executive vice president at CSOFT International, a localization company headquartered in Beijing and San Francisco. “That’s why we created Stepes, a mobile translation app that is the first to use a texting-based interface to help with localization.”

Stepes, mobile app works like this. First, a large translation project gets divided up into smaller components and given to individual translators. Companies can view the profiles and selected translation samples of all Stepes translators, who come from a worldwide pool of 50,000+ translators assembled by Stepes’ partner site, TermWiki.com.

Stepes – and the emergence of various online human translation services - represents a shift in strategy among businesses. Spurred on by globalization and slower domestic consumer spending, Asian companies and firms have sought to expand their global market shares. Going global however, requires translating all their products, interfaces, and websites into tens of different languages simultaneously. In particular, many companies looking to globalize are in the technology and e-commerce, raising new challenges like creating appealing product names, translating technical manuals, and constantly updating online content in several languages at once. As a result, the translation and localization industry is predicted to grow to $39 billion by 2018, and a large portion of that growth will come from Asian companies looking to expand globally.

“There’s incredible potential for innovation in localization right now,” said CSOFT’s Yao. “That’s why we need to be able to scale-up translation to meet globalization needs.”

Currently, there are only 250,000 professional translators worldwide for nearly 6,500 languages. The vast mismatch in the supply and demand for translation has resulted in much higher translation costs for businesses, slower turnaround time for projects, and a lack of coverage for lesser known languages. Traditional translation tools are usually desktop-based and require some technical knowledge of software, slowing down the translation process and also turning away many would-be translators.

Yet Yao notes that over half the world speaks at least two languages, if not more; that’s up to 3.65 billion people who have the potential to be translators, at least part time. Stepes targets these bilingual speakers and hopes that by providing free and easy to use translation tools directly through smartphones, more people will begin translating in their spare time. Collectively, even if each person only contributed a few sentences at a time, Yao believes that our translation capacity would still grow exponentially to meet true translation needs today.

Yao calls this expansion of our translation capacity a “big translation” approach. By harnessing the collective language talents of people around the world, he hopes to drive down translation costs for businesses while also empowering bilingual people to translate in their free time and earn money. In this way, Stepes users can “share” and pool language abilities that would otherwise have gone underutilized to tackle large translation projects for globalizing businesses.

Apps like AirBnB and Uber have already (successfully) tried this sharing economy model with travel accommodations and taxi rides. Could it work for translation? That is still unclear, but Stepes may be our best bet so far.

Written by Emily Feng