My wife is thinking about buying one of the new Apple iPads. After putting the kids to bed on Sunday evening, she read me one of the technology reviews of this heavily marketed innovation (I get bed time stories too).
The reviewer did a great job of summarizing the niche the iPad will likely fill in the market and what type of person will find it most beneficial, but that’s not what caught my attention. He went on to describe how Apple is known for being an innovative company...but in reality their engineers are great imitators.
The tablet PC was actually originally introduced by Microsoft in 2000, but never really took off (we’ll see if the iPad changes that). Digital music players were available before the iPod, and smart phones were available long before the iPhone. If you think about it, Apple was the innovator behind the original graphical user interface (GUI) for a computer and fumbled it away to another great imitator—Microsoft.
Oded Shenkar, a professor at Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business, has started to study this phenomenon. His findings are quite remarkable:
“It’s true—copying others’ ideas is good business. Sometimes it’s great business. And it happens more often than people think. In one study I reviewed, the researchers looked at 48 innovations and discovered that 34 of them—almost three-quarters—were copied.
The research also shows that the rate of imitation is accelerating. For example, Chrysler invented the modern minivan, with front-wheel drive and a carlike unibody, in 1984. It took almost a decade for another carmaker to copy it. But after GM introduced its Spark minicar, a Chinese imitation, the QQ, came out within a year and outsold the original by six to one in China. In fact, nearly 98% of the value generated by innovations is captured not by the innovators but by the often overlooked, despised copycats.”
Think about Dr. Shenkar’s last statement. If this is true, doesn’t it make sense to spend the majority of our time and effort trying to improve upon the items and/or systems that others have created? Some of the most successful companies in the country seem to think so:
“If you take the leading player in many sectors, you’ll be surprised to see that it’s not the pioneer but the able and creative imitator. Think McDonald’s, which imitated a system pioneered by White Castle; think Visa, MasterCard, and American Express, which all borrowed from the efforts of Diners Club to introduce the plastic card to a then-skeptical audience of consumers and merchants. Think Wal-Mart. Its founder admitted that it had borrowed most of its practices from its predecessors but then improved on them and combined them into a winning formula. Today’s lions are the descendants of copycats.”
So, if it’s so easy, why don’t more companies focus on being imitators rather than innovators? That’s a complex question. I’ll invite you to read the Harvard Business Review write-up to explore the answer... If you’re further interested, you may even want to buy Dr. Shenkar’s book on this subject when it is released this summer.
Before you invest more time learning about the details of this topic, take some time to start thinking through how all of this may apply to your business. Here are some important questions you may want to ask yourself:
- Are there innovative things your competitors are doing that could be copied and used in your business?
- Do you have a “not invented here” syndrome (i.e. if your company did not think of a particular idea, it is deemed inferior and often discarded) at work in your company? If so, this is deadly and has killed many companies.
- How fast can you bring new ideas (created by others) into your company and produce a result? One of the things that differentiate successful imitators from "cheap, also rans" is the speed with which they can implement a popular idea.
So, are we going to buy an Ipad? Probably not right now... We’re going to wait until all the bugs are worked out and Apple introduces their next version. Who knows, there may be some 2nd-tier imitators who by then, have created something cheaper and better!
Editor's Note: This article was written by Ben Hess. Ben is the Founding Partner and Managing Director of Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle. Comments or questions are welcome. If you're an email subscriber, reply to this WorkPuzzle email. If you read the blog directly from the web, you can click the "comments" link below.
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