Kai-Fu Lee, ex-President of Google China is going to prove that it’s unfair to call Chinese companies “non-innovative,” as he embarks on two projects focusing on China’s immense market of mobile subscribers to cater individual needs—may it be for work, home or travel.

This is what Tapas and Wonderpod is all about.  The projects are backed by Lee’s company, Innovation Works, and were launched after he resigned from Google about a year ago.

“Many, like Baidu, Google’s biggest rival in China, practice ‘micro-innovation’, and beat their competitors with creativity on a smaller scale,” as Lee was quoted in The Wall Street Journal.

Tapas is an operating system for smartphones, based on Google’s Android, and is specifically tailored for Chinese users. Within the OS is software that detects the origin of incoming calls, and a music player that displays song lyrics karaoke style, among  many other features. Tapas is expected to launch with handsets from Sharp, Haier and Tianyu.

Wonderpod, or Wandoujia in Chinese, was launched two months ago for Android devices and is still free. It started out in China as a “highly fragmented and competitive sector” and is meant to outfit the Chinese market. This allows subscribers to back up text messages in email format for easier reading, and download clips from Chinese streaming-video sites like Youko.com and Tudou.com as well.

Innovation Works is an ‘incubation’ company. It helps start up entrepreneurs match with engineers from top schools from all over China and promise them a Silicon Valley-level stakes. “On average, founding engineers in the U.S. receive a 1% stake in their companies,” he added. He regularly set meetings with his entrepreneurs as they get to hear motivation from guest speakers like Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang.

“We’re not trying to reinvent the wheel,” Lee said, but they sure are trying to conquer a specific niche.  It’s an important market to watch for development, as individualized needs will take on a more device-agnostic approach.  Creating profiles and OS options around customized consumer demands will drive the economy around virtualization, increasing demand for cloud-based solutions as well.