Innovation is the lifeblood of commerce. It’s in the DNA of most business leaders to become an innovating company. Imitation, its supposed oxymoron, suffers from a pejorative stereotype. Received wisdom holds that it’s innovators that generate monopoly profits that flow until the imitators show up. But what if it were the other way around with the imitators doing well and the innovators choking on their dust?
Oded Shenkar, Ford Motor Company Chair in Global Business Management and professor of management and human resources at the Fisher College of Business at Ohio State University, thinks we have the whole innovation-imitation thing backwards. The Israeli-born academic who holds degrees in East-Asian Studies and sociology from Hebrew University and Columbia, has spent several years researching the relationship between innovation and its idiot-savant cousin, imitation. He cites Harvard’s Ted Levitt that “imitation is not only more abundant than innovation, but actually a much more prevalent road to business growth and profits.” In a new book, “Copycats,” to be published in June of this year by Harvard Business Press, Shenkar sets forth a compelling case that the true spoils go to market imitators not the innovators.
Diners Club may have been the first credit card issuer, but today the market is ruled by Mastercard, Visa and American Express. In 1921, White Castle pioneered the idea of a standardized fast food restaurant chain and after the Second World War Rally’s launched the drive-through concept, but today McDonald’s dominates both. When McDonald’s turned to healthier fare in recent years, Yum Brands replicated the move in its Taco Bell and Pizza Hut chains. Honda and Toyota waited for Ford and GM to be the first followers of Chrysler’s minivan but ultimately pushed them to the side when they introduced their own versions. When RC Cola launched diet cola in the 1960s Coke and Pepsi quickly overtook the innovation and made it their own. Hertz’s Connect car sharing service is uncannily like that of the Zipcar startup that initiated the model. Think of all the YouTube lookalikes that abound on the Internet.
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Author: J.P. Donlon
