Great questions here!
I'd honestly suggest that you go with story one, because you've kind of already done the entrepreneurial thing and chances are that if you wanted to go start a business in China, you've got the experience you need to do that. Seems you wouldn't really need an MBA to be successful given your past experience and your regional expertise.
If you go with story 1 (corporate track --> corporate track within emerging markets/China), I think it's pretty logical.
If you go with story 2, I think you'd need to rework it a bit. I don't think it's credible to say you need an MBA to partner with your current company and continue to grow it. You could really do that without a 2 year full time MBA program. I think you could reshape the story to say that you want to move from the retail industry to say a tech start-up. You need an MBA to learn tech/innovation, business models, etc. and post graduation, you'd want to gain experience in a tech start-up. Once you've had a couple years understanding how tech start-ups work, you want to go to China and launch one. Perhaps you could tie in something about current Chinese reputation for innovation (often seen as a copycat versus innovator in the technology space), and how you want to start to change that? Just some ideas, but this would make an entrepreneurial story much more valid.
You want to think about your career narrative as an equation: a+b+c = d, where a = all the experience you've gained to date, b = the experience you'll gain in business school, c = the experience you'll gain in your short term career, and d = your long term goal. Everything needs to logically lead up to d, and the story should be so tightly woven that if you were to drop a, b, or c from your equation, you wouldn't be able to achieve d.
If you do pick entrepreneurship story, I do think you should get a little specific about the industry field, and only mention connections if they are relevant to that field.
As for innovation - your prior experience isn't relevant, but if you are applying to their entrepreneurship/innovation program, I think it's important that your career goals line up with that curriculum to some degree.
Finally, it's a little less important that your career goals specifically match the school's DNA, and more important that your DNA matches the school's (if that makes any sense). These schools want to bring students with diverse goals into their classrooms, so they are not evaluating your specific goals as much as they're evaluating whether they make sense given your profile/background, etc. But yes, I do think your story would mesh well with Cornell, Sloan and Stern in particular. I'm not as sure about Darden - not as entrepreneurially-oriented, but that doesn't mean they don't want to be! If you're really interested in emerging markets, I'd strongly suggest you look at Duke's program.
Good luck,
Mili
Mili Mittal
Senior Consultant
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