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“That taboo has a lot to do with it,
because if it’s taboo we don’t want to
discuss it, we do it behind closed
doors. And typically what we do behind
closed doors and in the dark is
not going to be dealt with very seriously,
very systematically. It’s not
going to produce very good results.
So we are doing imitation, but we’re
not doing it right.”
“There is only one area that has fallen behind and remains
with the old perspective and that is, I regret to say, business administration.
Which is kind of funny because you expect business
to be ahead of the game! But we are not, and I think there
are very, very important lessons to be learned from that,” says
Shenkar.
Whether those in business will be open to embracing the idea
remains to be seen, he maintains. This taboo we have already
discussed is part of the problem, as it means imitation in strategy
is somewhat ignored when it comes to business strategy.
“Reading some of the early texts, there were very few people
that noticed the importance of imitation,” Shenkar explains.
“Theodore Levitt, for instance, who wrote for the Harvard Business
Review back in the 1960s, he looked at companies and he
found out that the same company that had invested a lot of time
and developed a system to handle innovation dealt with imitation
in a most amateurish fashion. That’s 50 years ago. I was
shocked to find that that remains the case today.
ACCELERATING RATE
In Copycats, Shenkar argues that the
rate of imitation is in fact accelerating.
“Many will counter argue that in
a modern environment, innovation is
ever more important, because the
pace of, for example, product introduction
is so much faster. My answer
to that is that this is precisely what
makes imitation also much more important.
“You need only look to historical
data. If you look at something like
porcelain which was invented in
China around the 7th or 8th century
during the Tang Dynasty, it took European
nations about 1,000 years to
replicate it – and not for lack of trying!
“Then the further up you go, you
see that the length of time shortens
dramatically, so if you think of the
phonograph that Thomas Edison invented,
it took about 30 years before
we had the first commercial version.
The compact disc – it took three
years.”
Shenkar looks also at prescription
drugs. “It really began in the 1960s
and then it took maybe two years before
somebody would come up with a generic substitute. Then
it went down to nine months. Then for Prozac, it took two
months. And you see it in almost everything else, whether it’s a
product like a savings plan for a bank or a business model or a
service.”
“And it is because of this acceleration that you’ve got to have
the capability, you’ve got to have the infrastructure to actually
process it, turn it into a successful imitation. But until we put
our mind to it and do it in the right fashion, and systematically,
our chances of doing it right are really slim.
“Then we fail and it’s easy to come and say: ‘Imitation doesn’t
work, imitation doesn’t pay’. Well, it’s like everything else, if you
do it right it works.”
Copycats: How Smart Companies Use Imitation to Gain a
Strategic Edge, by Professor Oded Shenkar is published by Harvard
Business Press. This article first appeared in Irish Director
magazine, Spring 2011
Issue 2 Spring/Summer 2011 INNOVATION IRELAND REVIEW 59