The third-floor screening room in a hip Singaporean bar-lined neighborhood: black walls, tall ceilings, movie projector, and a roomful of globally minded entrepreneurs. This is the moment I will most remember from my last visit to Singapore. There is a shift underway in Asia, a bubbling up of self-made entrepreneurs. Asian commerce in the past five decades was dominated by larger-than-life conglomerate builders gathering assets under unofficial government protection. But this is changing. A new generation of entrepreneurs is emerging, outthinking the old guard.

Innovation has for years come from designers and marketers, from the creators of new products. The top innovation firms all come from the roots of building new products. Most innovative lists are populated by…well, Apple is always first…then comes a predictable list of companies that make cool products: Nike, Google, etc.

But this new generation of innovators knows that the greatest innovations are the ones you can’t see. I’ll explain.

As we kicked off the 18-hour flight home, I devoured a series of articles in the Singapore Times featuring the winners of the “Singapore Business Awards”: a doctor, an insurance CEO, an advertising exec, and a coffee product seller. Each started careers with little and now leads huge, fast-growing, disruptive businesses.

Dissect the reasons they give for their success and you will see a series of what I call “fourth options”: strategic choices that your customers love and that your competitors won’t copy.

Loo Choon Yong, for example, turned $20,000 and a freshly issued medical degree into a publically traded hospital and health provider giant. He did this by making five unorthodox choices over time:

When his fellow graduates joined practices, he borrowed money and bought one.

While competing practices assign patients to specific doctors, he and his partner “would cover for each other … we took turns.”

Instead of sending their testing to labs, they built their own.

Instead of sending patients to X-ray specialists, they created their own X-ray unit.

Though experts thought for-profit hospitals could not put patients’ interests first, his Raffles Hospital went public because it would create “external discipline.”

We can similarly dissect each of the other Singapore Business Awards winners. Indeed we could do the same with nearly any company that produces abnormally fast growth over an extended period of time. They introduce a set of “fourth options” that competitors resist copying and, as Loo Choon Yong’s example illustrates, a small minority of these “fourth options” are products or product features.