On the other hand, the imitation has mostly bad rap. Copying others has a bit of a stigma. Even there is a quote “it is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation”. It’s not just in the modern world and in business that imitation has a bad name. Professor Shenkar shows how scientists for a long period derided imitation as “a low-level ability, a behavior typical of the mentally weak and the childish and a process much less demanding than individual trial and error,” he says. Nineteenth-century naturalists considered imitation to be “characteristic of women, children, savages, the mentally impaired and animals” who had “little ability to reason for themselves.”
So, what is imitation? How is it defined now? The term imitation is also fairly simple to define, and the simplest to accomplish: a person or company notices what someone else is doing, and decides to mimic their actions in hopes of achieving the same results. Imitation is looked down upon, and perhaps rightly so, as it's often the result of an individual of inferior intelligence or insight who is merely copying a pattern of behavior he doesn't understand and putting blind faith in his ability to achieve similar results.
“In the real world, companies copy and succeed. The iPod was not the first digital-music player; nor was the iPhone the first smartphone or the iPad the first tablet. Apple imitated others’ products but made them far more appealing. The pharmaceutical industry is split between inventors and imitators. Some innovators, such as Pfizer, have joined the copycats, starting generic-drugs businesses themselves. The multi-billion-dollar category of supermarket own-label products is based on copying well-known brands, sometimes down to details of the packaging. Fast-fashion firms have built empires copying innovations from the catwalk.”
As Mike Rowe defined “Innovation without imitation is really a complete waste of time or? Can imitation be core of the business? Is there really no success without copying some part of other existing ideas? In my point of view, imitation can be more important to business growth than innovation is. If only imitation is not mindless repetition and “blind copy paste”. It should be intelligent search for cause and effect. True innovating is really a combination of copying the best ideas of others, adding new things to them, improving on them, learning from the mistakes of others, and continually experimenting. Imitation can not only save time and money for businesses, but also, most importantly, give opportunity to learn from best practices and mistakes. imitation can be more important to business growth than innovation is. But just following every part and every active of the other successful business never be succeed. It’s not only important for entrepreneurs to innovate and imitate their own processes, but that it’s important to imitate, innovate slightly, and then imitate once again to find success.
Support-1: There are many famous examples of how company's imitations actually surpassed the original innovator’s product. One more surprising finding is that according to “Imitation is more valuable than innovation”, Harvard Business Review, by Oded shenkar, 2010, innovators capture around 2.2% of the total value of their innovations. The rest 97.8% probably went to imitators. Imitation is underappreciated in today’s business. There are more and more examples of companies that innovated new products but lost out in the marketplace to others afterward. For example;
• Coca Cola imitated RC Cola in replicating its diet cola product
• Visa and Mastercard imitated the credit card concept from Diners Club
• McDonalds took the fast food chain concept from White Castle
• EMI created CAT scans but the market today is dominated by General Electric.
Oded Shenkar, a business professor at Ohio State University, supported that idea in a new provocative book called Copycats: How Smart Companies Use Imitation to Gain a Strategic Edge, published by Harvard Business Press. The argument that imitation is smarter than innovation is borne out by numbers. He says innovators as a group get only a small fraction of the value of an innovation. Typically, the better returns go to businesspeople often derided as copycats. Shenkar also cites executives and reports involving famous companies that you’d think would be big champions of innovation, yet suggest that innovation isn’t the end-all, either. Explaining Pfizer ‘s decision to enter genetic drugs, for instance, David Simmons, general manager of the company’s newly formed “established products” business, once said: “We’re always about innovation, and it will always be the lifeblood and sustaining element of Pfizer, but we don’t see it as the be-all and end-all,” Shenkar writes, citing The Wall Street Journal. But, as Obed Shenkar points out; simply copying the market leader in your category is unlikely to work because a) you are different, and b) your consumer is likely to be different. Instead, you need to innovate by adding an adaptive and differentiating twist. Companies, rather than just imitate, should combine creativity and imitation, and come up with their own competitive advantage. This group of businesses is what Shenkar calls “imovators.” For an imitation strategy to work, you can’t just blindly copy – you need to imitate smartly – by adding a twist that gives you a competitive advantage by building on your strengths and targeting an unsatisfied market niche.
Support-2: To support this idea, another intriguing presentation I totally agree is from Jeffrey Tucker of the Mises Institute. At the end of the talk, Jeffrey “look for successful behaviors in the market. Emulate them, copy them, and improve them just slightly. That’s how people make money in a market economy.” Basically what Tucker is stating is it’s not only important for entrepreneurs to innovate and imitate their own processes, but that it’s important to imitate, innovate slightly, and then imitate once again to find success. The continual process of imitation and innovation and the freedom to do so is what leads to long-term prosperity for individuals and businesses. Building on that observation, Jeffrey Tucker encourages entrepreneurs to not focus on creating something entirely new, but to focus on copying the best innovations in the world today while adding innovations to make it slightly better. Good examples that can support his ideas might include followings
Hugh Hefner, after being denied a $5 raise at Esquire, or so the story goes, went on to start in 1953 his own publication, which would be similar to the widely acclaimed periodical but better, featuring everything from men’s fashion to literary works.
Swarovski, the Austrian producer of luxury cut lead glass, borrowed the idea for its Stardust Collection, without giving proper credit apparently, to a much younger Italian firm called PrettiBijoux, whom had launched the versatile Cristalnet concept months earlier. I learned this by speaking to PrettiBijoux’s owner, completely by chance, at a fashion event in Belgium. The Italian lady was flattered by Swarovski’s move, but not at all amused.
Finally, impromptu Apple Stores in Kūnmíng, China, near-perfect copies of the originals, had even their staff fooled into thinking they were working for the famous American technology company. As CNN reports, with the country’s middle class emancipating fast, events like these are more common than ever.
Support-3: The innovator does not necessarily invent something entirely new to act in an innovative manner, and it is by nature an innovation begins with the same observation of the imitator - the difference being that the innovator makes adaptations the act of imitation. That is, he understands what he is seeking to achieve, can perceive the way in which another person is trying to accomplish the goal, and recognize ways in which a specific behavior is likely to result in success of failure. And in that way, the innovator can adopt some parts of the process that seem beneficial, and substitute a more effective method for those parts of the process that seem flawed. Imitation without understanding the context of the product or service does not work, because it does not take into account necessary adjustments to the key environmental peculiarities that vary between the model and the imitator. Adapting the imitation to own market with market understanding is very important. It might start with what someone else is doing but creativity and innovation use that as leaping off points.
As noted in the book, Copycats: How Smart Companies Use Imitation To Gain a Strategic Edge, Chapter 4, where it details the massive successes and failures of copycatting in two key industries: airlines and discount retail. It is about the success of Southwest Air, which "imitated" the failed People Express, but figured out how to do discount air travel while avoiding a few key elements that resulted in People Express' failure. He then goes through a variety of other airlines and how they tried to mimic Southwest Air, covering many examples of both success and failure, and explaining why some succeeded where others failed. Most notable, perhaps, was the dismal failure of pretty much every single attempt by the big airlines to copy Southwest. They all appeared to copy the superficial aspects of it -- the key things that everyone knew about -- without quite grasping the underlying structural reasons why Southwest succeeded, thereby setting up a business model in conflict with itself. It's yet another fantastic reminder that the idea that big companies can just come in and copy what some innovator does is quite frequently not really true.
The same chapter also looks closely at Wal-Mart, how it, too, copied certain key aspects from others, while also learning from the mistakes some other players made. The chapter notes that Wal-Mart, K-Mart and Target were all founded in the same year (1962), but were hardly the first in that space. Instead, all were copying a few other players who were there before -- none of whom survived. It looks at how these three firms have changed over time, including how Wal-Mart copied many ideas from K-Mart, and then improved upon them, and how K-Mart then tried to copy Wal-Mart back, but failed (for the same reason that the big airlines had so much trouble copying Southwest -- they got the superficial stuff, but didn't realize how that clashed with certain infrastructure issues). And then it covers how Target has carved out its own highly successful niche, both by copying Wal-Mart, but also in tweeking the model in different ways as well, such as targeting higher-end shoppers. To add up, from my point of view, innovation is better to be defined a combination of the two, invention and imitation.
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