Spent the past 15yrs working mostly in Enterprise IT in the Midwest, which leads me to dealing with a lot of Asian nationals.
Some of the most brilliant technicians I've worked with are Indian, but I'm also astounded at their lack of 'out of box' thinking skills. Anybody who works corporate IT is likely chuckling with me given the aggravation at having to deal with a room full of brilliant Indian engineers who otherwise can't solve any problem unless the parameters are clearly defined. If the problem is even slightly outside the interactive envelope you might as well ask the janitor to solve it.
This is also a reason that Indian engineers are so popular in corporate projects. You can assign them to a project and the'll rather blindly adhere to the the tasks while the American guys will often quickly get bored or try to innovate when innovation is being discouraged. Sometimes the ability to pull sh_t out of the air isn't a desired skill trait.
This may seem racist in a sense, but there's a legitimate cause behind this. Industrialization, mass production, and the assimiliation of advanced technology at the turn of the century occured much faster in Western Countries than Eastern. This allowed culture and education in the west to wrap around applied technology a hundred years ahead of less developed countries.
What's changing now is we have been pushing into a technological diminishing returns envelope for several decades, and with rapid and immediate exchanges of information Asian cultures have rapidly closed the technology gap. The fact remains Western Cultures have been entrenched with dealing with applied technology for far longer though, and this is likely the source of better innovation skills. However, given the decline of applied skills taught in American schools along with the extinction of actual hands on industrial production in the West this is going to change the tables, and rapidly.