By Steven Levine @ Axios.com, May 30

There is a new threat from Beijing, which is increasingly buying or reverse-engineering big tech breakthroughs and transforming them into cheap, commodity products, according to a Harvard professor.

Why it matters: Speaking at a conference in Dallas, Willy Shih, an economist at Harvard Business School, forecast "a gale of creative destruction," in which "whole [American] industries will be transformed, or may disappear."

The background: China does steal intellectual property, and pressures U.S., German and other foreign companies to relinquish proprietary know-how in exchange for market access, Shih explains in a piece out today in MIT Sloan Management Review.

But he says Western companies are confronted with another challenge, and that's the commoditization of their most precious intellectual property, contained within sophisticated tools that often "took years or even a generation to develop." [....]