The Art of Copying

The Schumpeter column in the May 12, 2012 edition of the Economist covered an important engineering topic - - Pretty Profitable Parrots.  The message might be heresy - - but business should celebrate imitation and being good at copying is at least as important as being innovative.  Copying is problematic on two fronts.  The first is the negative impact on organizational ego ("Innovator or die!!" - - imitators are cast as the villain).  The second is risk - - legal.  Although the Art of Copying is just that, art - - where one has plenty of wiggle room to imitate safely.

Consider this from the article - -

"As a result, firms pay insufficient attention to the art of copying.  Levitt (Ted Levitt, management guru) examined a group of companies whose sales depended on regularly launching new products.  None of them, he found, had either a formal or informal policy on how to respond to other firms' innovations.  So they were often far too slow to imitate rivals' successes, and missed out on profits.  Not much has changed since Levitt's day.  Though copying is fairly common, lots of companies fail to do it effectively.  American firms in particular are too obsessed with innovation, argues Mr. Shenkar (Oded Shenkar, management professor at The Ohio State University).  By contrast, Asian companies - such as Panasonic, whose former parent, Matshushita, was nicknamed maneshita denki, "electronics that have been copied" - have excelled at legal imitation.

Excessive copying, of course, could be bad for society as a whole.  Joseph Schumpeter worried that if innovators could not get enough reward from new products because imitators were taking so much of the profit, they would spend less on developing them (hence the justification for granting inventors temporary monopolies in the form of patents).  But that is not the immediate concern of corporations.  Copying is here to stay; businesses may as well get good at it."