Having become a significant part of the world's economy and investment regimes, China now plays a central role in influencing geopolitics, world-class institutions, and global development. However, facing increasingly fierce competitions and challenges in a global landscape, China is undergoing an unprecedented socio-economic transformation and reform, which steers this nation towards building new types of industrialization, informationalization, urbanization, agricultural modernization, and greenization, as indicated in the latest 13th 5-year plan. Under this circumstance, a variety of critical management issues arise.However, pursuing strategies and innovation in China should take the road less traveled, rather than being confined to mundane product extensions, "me-too" business models, or short-term band-aid solutions. Chinese enterprises can't extrapolate the past in an attempt to predict the future; instead, they should stimulate their employees' creative ideas and inspiration to ambitiously lay out unconventional strategies for cutting-edge innovation in the fuzzy front end.This special issue, therefore, calls for the use of more holistic, dynamic, and contingent approaches from multi- or even cross-disciplinary perspectives to investigate strategy-and innovation-related issues as well as corresponding novel phenomena during China's transformational period. Whereas most research conducted in China still mainly focuses on validating Western theories, we particularly welcome papers that draw on the Chinese context (e.g., the economic, societal, cultural and political changes in the transitional period) to develop novel, indigenous theories and models.