SMITH BRAIN TRUST -- Despite its recent stock market volatility, slow growth and ranking 28th in global competitiveness, China remains the world’s second-largest economy. The country’s leaders are now keen to see China close in on Silicon Valley in terms of creating world-beating tech firms.

With double-digit annual GDP growth and the world's largest population, China until recently looked like the long-term answer for U.S. companies seeking never-ending growth. With its slowdown and concurrent stock-market turmoil, China is posing fresh challenges, says Anil Gupta, the Michael D.

For a second consecutive time, Anil K. Gupta, the Michael D. Dingman Chair in Strategy and Entrepreneurship for the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, has been named to Thinkers50 -- widely recognized as the first, and definitive, compilation of the world’s 50 foremost business thinkers.

SMITH BRAIN TRUST — "Core competence (as a bedrock management principle) is dead," Fast Company proclaimed in 2013. But at least one Forbes writer disagreed. "It has not died," he wrote.

SMITH BRAIN TRUST -- China is poised to drive a projected global surge in wind energy, while a looming Uber stake in India could make that country’s taxi industry more carbon friendly, according to comments by Smith professor Anil K.

SMITH BRAIN TRUST -- Some foreign retailers in China are stumbling. Others are thriving. Count Home Depot and Best Buy among recent failures.

SMITH BRAIN TRUST -- Google set the business world abuzz Monday by announcing a reorganization: Google's founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, will now head a new entity called Alphabet, a holding company whose holdings include — Google.

SMITH BRAIN TRUST -- If India models China, it can similarly affect the global economy. India aims to increase its manufacturing contribution to its GDP from 17 percent to 25 percent within the next decade. The initiative, dubbed “Make India,” is the “only way India can create highly productive jobs for the 10 million-plus youngsters who join the country's labor force each year and the much larger number of farmers who need to move from working the soil to working on the factory floor,” says Anil K.

Anil Gupta, Michael D. Dingman Chair in Strategy and Entrepreneurship at the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business, is nominated for Thinkers50, the world's 50 most influential living management thinkers.  Vote for him now at www.thinkers50.com. 

SMITH BRAIN TRUST -- Leaders in China and India will meet Friday with their economies poised to be among the three largest in the world by 2025.