Professor Richard Li-Hua

Professor Richard Li-Hua and His Theory of Chinese Harmonious-Progressive Innovation

Professor Richard Li-Hua is the originator of the Theory of Chinese Harmonious-Progressive Innovation. He currently serves as President of the Global Innovation Institute at Xi’an Peihua University and as the University’s Strategic Advisor for International Development. He is also President of the Cambridge China Innovation Institute in the United Kingdom and a columnist for Cambridge Vision in Outlook China. In addition, he is Founder and President of ELITE Innovation College Cambridge, UK, a Visiting Scholar at Cambridge Judge Business School, and a Strategic Advisor to the Research Center for Technological Innovation at Tsinghua University. Professor Li-Hua has also held distinguished visiting professorships at Henley Business School, University of Reading; the University of Pennsylvania; the University of Windsor; and Sun Yat-sen University. In academic leadership, he has served as President of the China Association for Management of Technology (CAMOT) since 2006 and, since 2025, as Chair of the International Education Digitalisation Committee of the China Association for Educational Technology.

Professor Li-Hua previously served as International President of Xi’an Peihua University, President of Staffordshire University’s New Beacon campus in the United Kingdom, and President of Zhengzhou Sias University. In 2022, he was named one of the ‘Global 50 Outstanding Educators in Higher Education’ at the Strategic Management Society Annual Conference held at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford. He is widely recognised as an influential strategist, innovation scholar and thinker. His academic presentations are noted for their intellectual energy and for communicating original insights into innovation theory on international stages.

Professor Li-Hua’s research spans international technology transfer, technology and innovation management, strategic management, leadership, educational innovation and global higher-education development strategy. He has published more than one hundred English-language papers in internationally recognised journals and conferences, as well as over fifty articles in Chinese and international publications including Outlook China: Cambridge Vision, Tsinghua Business Review, Chinese Enterprise Management and UN Chronicle, systematically developing the Theory of Chinese Harmonious-Progressive Innovation. He has published eight academic monographs, including Technology and Knowledge Transfer in China, Competitiveness of Chinese Firms: West Meets East, Chinese Harmonious-Progressive Innovation: Leading the Future (2017), and The Innovation Gene of Chinese Civilisation: Harmonious-Progressive Innovation and the Rise of China’s Innovative Economy (2026, in Chinese). Since 2004, he has worked with Emerald Publishing in the United Kingdom to establish several English-language academic journals covering technology management in China, Chinese economic and foreign-trade studies, knowledge innovation in China, science and technology policy, and Chinese entrepreneurship.

The Connection between Chinese Harmonious-Progressive Innovation and Zhang Zai’s Philosophy

Professor Li-Hua grew up in a strong family tradition of scholarship. In 1940, his father, Mr Li Qingtian, founded a private school in their hometown and taught the Four Books and Five Classics, fostering Professor Li-Hua’s enduring interest in classical Chinese philosophy. At the 2016 CAMOT International Conference at the University of Cambridge, Professor Li-Hua first used the Theory of Chinese Harmonious-Progressive Innovation to explain the deeper logic of China’s peaceful rise. The theory grew from his sustained interdisciplinary inquiry across economics, management, history and philosophy, and was particularly influenced by the thought of the Northern Song philosopher Zhang Zai, also known as Master Hengqu. Zhang Zai’s sense of mission—‘to establish the heart for Heaven and Earth, to establish the destiny of the people, to continue the lost learning of past sages, and to bring peace for generations to come’—together with his dialectical understanding that opposing forces ultimately seek reconciliation, provided an important philosophical and methodological foundation for Professor Li-Hua’s theory.

The Theory of Chinese Harmonious-Progressive Innovation seeks to explain China’s distinctive model of innovation, examine the cultural foundations of sustainable development, decode the internal mechanisms behind the rise of China’s innovative economy, and clarify the logic of China’s path of peaceful development. With harmony at the centre of its philosophy of innovation, the theory seeks a dialectical unity between tradition and modernity, local roots and global engagement, and stability and change. It therefore offers a new theoretical perspective and practical pathway for innovation and development in China and beyond.

The Theory and the Harmonious-Progressive Innovation Model

The Harmonious-Progressive Innovation Model (HPIM), developed from the Theory of Chinese Harmonious-Progressive Innovation, is rooted in the continuity of Chinese civilisation and its philosophical tradition of harmony. Its internal logic presents innovation as a non-substitutive process of symbiotic evolution. With ‘embracing contradiction’ at its core, the model moves beyond a Western binary assumption of ‘new versus old’ and understands innovation as a dynamic balance and co-evolution among heterogeneous elements held in productive tension. Within this paradigm, tradition is not an object to be discarded through iteration. It is a ‘Mother Chain’ carrying the genes of civilisation—an open foundational architecture that allows each era to build new application layers within a continuing protocol, thereby uniting historical continuity with contemporary creativity.

The model involves three theoretical shifts. First, it moves beyond the rupture logic of disruptive innovation and gives priority to creative transformation over creative destruction. The conservation-led renewal of Xi’an City Wall provides an example of this Eastern approach: historical heritage becomes a ‘living cultural protocol’ and an interactive, evolving civic public chain. Digital-era functions are added while material authenticity is retained, producing civilisational continuous integration ‘from 1 to N’. Second, the model establishes a symbiotic mechanism of ‘harmony in diversity’. Innovation actors do not engage in a zero-sum game; through seeking common ground while respecting difference, they form complementary relationships in which technological increments and inherited assets reinforce one another across time and space, generating nonlinear emergent value. Third, the model establishes an adaptive principle of advancing with the times. It rejects static equilibrium and argues that innovation systems must dynamically couple institutional flexibility with cultural resilience, sustaining a generative balance between stable expectations and the momentum of change.

A civilisational innovation interpretation of the Needham Question provides historical counter-evidence and theoretical support for the model. Moving beyond institutional determinism, the theory offers an endogenous explanation through the integrated perspective of ‘civilisational genes, institutional frameworks and a super-large market’. Premodern China did not lack technological breakthroughs, but it lacked institutional mechanisms capable of systematically converting craft experience into theoretical knowledge. Cultural potential therefore failed to resonate historically with intellectual-property protection and market incentives. China’s contemporary innovation rise can be understood as a modern activation of civilisational genes through harmonious-progressive innovation: holistic thinking reshapes a new whole-of-nation system, inclusive ethics coordinates complex governance, and a super-large market supplies demand and room for experimentation. Together, these forces creatively connect traditional innovation culture with a modern technological ecosystem. From this perspective, China’s failure to generate a modern scientific revolution was not a defect in its civilisational genes, but the absence of a co-evolutionary mechanism linking culture, institutions and markets. China’s contemporary revival, in turn, demonstrates the broader explanatory power of harmonious-progressive innovation as a model of civilisational transformation.