Chinese shanzhai counterfeiters practice customer development

Fast Company ran an interesting article yesterday about Chinese mobile phone pirates and the Arab Spring, but one paragraph jumped out at me:

With their tiny production runs, shanzhai could manufacture a thousand phones, seed the local markets, see if they caught on, and then crank out some more. Established players like Nokia were soon crying foul, even as they scrambled to keep up. Development cycles collapsed from 9 to 12 months to as little as three months. Instead of knockoffs, the counterfeiters were churning out innovation and forcing large companies to play catch up.

Who knew that pirate cell phone makers were lean startups?

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