China has just achieved an impressive milestone: It has built the world's fastest supercomputer. The Tianhe-1A is more than 40% faster than the previous leader, at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. This is not an isolated event. Other, more mundane indicators of growing scientific capability in China have been emerging for years, such as the growing portion of articles in leading chemistry and physics journals that come from the country.

The supercomputer breakthrough is clearly a remarkable development that showcases the country's rising capabilities in research and development.

Supercomputers are the tools that provide protein folding in biology, financial trading strategies on Wall Street, weather modeling and forecasting, and data needed for oil well drilling, to name but a few of their practical applications. And Chinese firms are advancing with these applications, filing more patent applications at home than ever before, and also filing in Europe and the United States.

What does this mean for the global economy? The news is full of headlines and stories about the need to rebalance the world economy by having China's currency appreciate and stimulating greater domestic consumption of Chinese goods and services. The best way to understand the supercomputer development is as a rebalancing of global science and technology activity, one that is already well underway. New infrastructure, expanding universities and growing national research laboratories will all help attract the best and the brightest young minds from around the globe to China. This new balance of science and technology is a leading indicator of a new balance of economic activity. China's economy is not simply rising in the short term; the R&D investments being made today will enable it to grow a long way further.

But is this growing scientific and technological capability a threat to the rest of the world, or an opportunity? When Japan seized the supercomputer crown back in 2002, the world didn't suddenly tilt toward the Japanese. Nor did U.S. companies lose their technological edge. If anything, U.S. firms have had significantly better technological performance than their Japanese counterparts since 2002. This reminds us that innovation requires more than just science and technology.

But there is no denying that we will be innovating in a world where Chinese technology plays a growing role. Today many think of China as the world's manufacturing workshop, building designs from leading Western companies. Some alert businesses are already bringing products designed and developed in China back into the U.S., such as GE introducing a low-cost ultrasonic imaging device that was created in its labs in China. It is likely that we will see significantly more advanced technologies come out of China to be exported to markets around the world. So we need to get ready to compete with them. Or, better yet, we need to find ways to utilize this expansion of technologies to fuel our own businesses, as GE has already done.

How can we innovate, and compete, effectively? Chinese companies have their own challenges to overcome before they rise to the top rank of innovative businesses around the world. Because many of them are former state-owned enterprises used to doing everything themselves, they are not very open, and that will limit their innovation potential. The best companies today do not innovate solely with their own ideas and technologies; rather they search the world for the best ideas and technologies to incorporate with their own, to build new products and systems that solve real problems.

IBM ( IBM - news - people ) and others work closely with the Linux community in server operating systems. Apple ( AAPL - news - people ) partners with key suppliers to introduce products with new technologies that Apple doesn't itself build. Air Bharti in India even shares cell towers and other mobile phone infrastructure with its competitors to reduce up-front capital investment and offer cheaper phone service.

So the biggest companies are not necessarily the best innovators, and you can innovate quite effectively by making the most of the discoveries of others in your own new products and services. The future will not go to those with the fastest supercomputers. It will be won by those that make the best use of the world's ideas. This means that the winners in the innovation race will be those who learn how to open up and collaborate. What is new is that more of this collaboration and cooperation will need to be done with Chinese ideas and technologies, in addition to those from the West. There will be great opportunities for anyone committed to working with and learning from Chinese science and technology.