Creativity - IDA Ireland

» MANAGEMENT INNOVATION
TACKLING THE TABOO
One can’t help admiring Shenkar for tackling such a taboo subject
as copying. “Absolutely, there is a taboo,” he agrees. “There
is a very strong stigma associated with copying but, by the way,
this is more in Western societies than in some other societies,
and even in Western societies this is only the product of the last
century because there was a period in time where we valued imitation.
I hope that we will learn to do it again.”
Shenkar has done many years’ research into China, and has
penned such highly regarded books as The Chinese Century.He
believes that we in the West may have lessons to learn from the
Chinese in this area.
“It’s kind of ironic, China was one of the impetuses for me
doing the book,” he says. “If you look at the Chinese they are
also very focused on innovation. So it sounds almost funny to
them that we mention imitation. Yet if you look on the ground
they are tremendous imitators and I believe this is one reason
for their success. Part of the lesson we can learn is that innovation
is not enough, you also have to know how to imitate.”
THE IMOVATORS
Shenkar calls corporations that carry out excellent imitation
‘imovators’. “I call these companies imovators because they do
imitation and innovation very well, and indeed part of the argument
in the book is that the two capabilities are rather complementary
– certainly they are not contradictory.”
He points to the iconic Apple. “It’s ironic because everyone
thinks of Apple as the ultimate innovator but actually Apple did
not and does not invent new technologies.
“You might argue that they innovate in the business model
they embed the innovation in, but they rely very much on imitating
existing technology.”
Ryanair is also an imovator, argues Shenkar. “Ryanair is a
classic example that I used in the book and there are many others.
Those companies know how to do both activities well – both
imitation and innovation. My argument is if you want to be successful
you really need to be able to do both.
“When Ryanair started it was really about to fail. Basically it
came up with the idea of being the discount airline here, and
was going to compete with Aer Lingus and the other players.
There was only one problem. It didn’t really have the business
model to support it. Then when the current CEO was appointed,
the boss basically said: ‘Let’s go to Texas’ and they went and visited
Southwest Airlines. As soon as they came back they set out
to copy Southwest.
“I give Ryanair a lot of credit for being very open about it, and
not shying away from it. They were very, very clear about it. So
they set up to copy the model, to replicate the model and then,
importantly, they decided they could take it further, take it in
another direction.”
It is no accident that Shenkar uses Southwest among his case
studies. The low-cost US airline regularly appears in the major
works on business strategy.
“It’s a fascinating example. Even one piece by one of the strategy
gurus, Michael Porter, brings in Southwest Airlines as an
example of a model that cannot be imitated! Okay? So I figure
I’m going to take that as supposedly the more difficult example
and show you that it can be imitated.”
‘Everyone thinks
of Apple as the
ultimate
innovator but
actually Apple
did not and does
not invent new
technologies’
That said, Shenkar also demonstrates in the book that there
are many companies that have tried this and failed.
FALLING BEHIND
When Shenkar went to tackle this area for his new book, he
began by looking to other areas of scholarship, and read voraciously
“anything from history to archaeology, art to biology,
neurosciences and so forth”.
“I had this feeling that maybe within the field we call business
administration, we are really missing something, and boy was I
in for a surprise!” he continues.
“All of these different disciplines, which really range from the
humanities to the natural sciences, have gone through a transformation
over time. They have started at some point by looking
at imitation as something very primitive. Now, over time they
have all changed their perspective quite dramatically, and they
all have come to see imitation as a very complex and intelligent
capability.
58 INNOVATION IRELAND REVIEW Issue 2 Spring/Summer 2011