Winter Nie is a Professor of Leadership and Organizational Change at IMD Business School. She is the co-author of Made in China-Secrets of China's Dynamic Entrepreneurs (2009) and In the Shadow of the Dragon-The Global Expansion of Chinese Companies (2012). She started this research project in 2016.

Mark J. Greeven is a Chinese-speaking Dutch professor of innovation and strategy at IMD Business School in Switzerland and former faculty at China's leading innovation institute at Zhejiang University. He is the author of Pioneers, Hidden Champions, Changemakers, and Underdogs (MIT Press, 2019) and Business Ecosystems in China (Routledge, 2017).

Yunfei Feng is a researcher at IMD and had many in-depth interviews and discussions with the Chinese executives. She has kept up with the most cutting-edge development in China's e-commerce and digital space. She had her own entrepreneurial venture in online business education.

James Wang is an economist and a Professor of Finance at City University of Hong Kong. His commentaries, written for hedge fund managers, on topics such as Sino-American relations, style and substance of the 5th-generation leaders of China, prospects of SOE reforms and other contemporary topics, were collected in the book Early Innings of A Long Game.