5.
Imitation Capabilities and Processes
Those who look at works of painting and drawing must have the imitative faculty and no one could understand the painted horse or bull unless he knew what such creatures are like.
—Apollonius of Tyana1
As scientists have come to recognize, the ability to imitate is not widely distributed. As for business firms, some have consistently shown an ability to imitate effectively—so much so that they have repeatedly grabbed the leadership position from pioneers and innovators, as IBM did, first with mainframes and then with personal computers. In contrast, others have failed repeatedly despite the lessons they have learned from prior failures, both others’ and their own, as shown in the case of Delta Air Lines’ Song spin-off.
Of course, success and failure are the result of many factors, not the least luck. However, when one looks at the evidence, it is clear that underlying capabilities have a lot to do with the outcome of imitation attempts. The most important breakthrough of neuroscientists working on imitation has been the discovery of mirror neurons, which permit an intelligent reference to and empathy with the actions of others. These neurons are behind what cognitive scholars call symbolic, or fifth level, imitation, in which the behavior of the observer does not match that of the demonstrator.2 In firms, the equivalent of mirror neurons are imitation capabilities that make it possible to untangle another organization’s combinative, embedded model and then translate and apply it to the imitator’s culture, needs, and circumstances. These capabilities are the focus of this chapter.
Based on my experience, an extensive review of available evidence, and numerous conversations with senior executives, I have compiled a list of capabilities that must be developed and mastered if a firm wishes to be successful in the imitation game. Although each of these capabilities requires its own set of skills, they are closely intertwined, each building on the other.
- Getting ready: Building a culture and mind-set that not only accept but also value and encourage imitation as much as innovation
- Referencing: The capability to identify and target imitation models of potential value
- Searching, spotting, and sorting: The ability to seek, spot, and select products, processes, services, practices, ideas, and models that are worth imitating
- Contextualizing: The skill to identify relevant environmental factors and view the original and the imitation as embedded in respective sets of circumstances
- Deep diving: The capacity to conduct in-depth investigation that goes beyond simple correlation analysis and captures complex cause-and-effect relationships
- Implementing: The ability to rapidly and effectively absorb, integrate, and deploy imitated elements down to the operational level
Let’s look at each of these skills in depth.
Getting Ready: Preparing Your Firm to Imitate Another
With scholars and practitioners firmly focused on how to deter imitation by others, firms seldom look at what might prevent them from imitating others. Barriers range from complacency and a narrow market perspective to partisan, vested interests, the comfort of familiar routines, and pride in one’s own achievements. Theodore Levitt recalls how competitors in the portable appliance field reacted with skepticism to the novel electric toothbrush. 3 Even when firms surveyed users and prospective buyers to determine whether they should introduce a version, they did so in an atmosphere of skepticism, indifference, and casualness, reserving their attention and priority to “invented here” projects.
This mind-set remains entrenched, ironically more so among innovators. Research shows that firms with vast technological experience, efficient R&D departments, and a history of being first to market with technological innovations “hardly content themselves with producing a mere imitation.”4
“People’s natural inclination is to believe that they’re going to invent everything that’s the best,” says Clayton C. Daley Jr., former vice chairman and CFO of Procter & Gamble.5 To counteract the tendency, P&G instills in its people the “recognition of the fact that not every good idea is invented by our R&D people or our marketing people,” Daley adds. This, he acknowledges, requires a transformational change. Many executives, including The Limited’s Leslie Wexner, Lionel Nowell, formerly of PepsiCo, and Battelle’s Alex Fischer, view the negative connotation of imitation as the biggest obstacle to its successful commercialization of ideas.6
Be Humble
Henry Dyer, a Scottish engineer who came to Japan at the request of the Japanese government in the 1870s, later wrote, prophetically, “Great Britain should not be above learning a few lessons from Japan.”7 Building a culture of imitation is not only about openness but also about not holding yourself above others, successful or not. A psychology study found that “imitative behavior implies abandonment of one’s own answer in a context where self-competence is rooted in one’s answers” and that “the less subjects expressed superiority to the competent competitor the more they imitated.”8
This does not mean suspending your individual judgment but rather learning to be humble and not filtering out information and opinions that come from elsewhere. Carl Kohrt, Battelle’s president and CEO, lists the vice of “being too arrogant” as a major obstacle to successful imitation, as do G. Gilbert Cloyd of P&G; Stan Vriends, vice president for operations at Carraro, a leading Italian manufacturer of automotive components and other gear; and Fifth Third Bank’s retired chairman Don Shackelford.9
Humility is also in order when you look at competitors that are imitating you: it is easy to dismiss incremental improvement as “just a copy,” as Kasper did when it encountered a superior Canon component, but such complacency, as Kasper found out, can lead to adverse results.10 According to Nowell, to make imitation acceptable, “flexibility, open mindedness, and willingness to change” are critical; to The Limited’s Wexner, it is curiosity that is most important. 11
It is not a coincidence that these same attributes often surface in reference to innovation. In the case of imitation, however, there is one more obstacle to overcome: the stigma associated with the activity. In 1600, Japan, which had more guns than any other nation at that time, had let this crucial technology die out because it was associated with low-status foreigners and challenged the sword monopoly of the samurai class. 12
Many firms suffer a similar predicament, and part of the problem, but also the solution, has to do with the reward system. As Levitt notes, “plaudits, brownie points, and promotions go to the clearly innovative individuals,” while “the people who suggest imitative practices get viewed as being somehow inferior or less worthy.”13 Have you seen a CEO bestow an imitation award ? Have you noticed pictures of “the imitator of the year” next to those of innovators on the company’s wall of fame? Yet, says Wexner, imitation needs to be “celebrated.”14 This statement is consistent with the psychological models that view “vicarious behavior,” essentially true imitation, as dependent on the reinforcement or punishment of the modeled behavior.15
A first step in fully leveraging the commercial potential of ideas is an outcome-based suggestion system, as at, for instance, Sherwin-Williams and P&G. Clayton Daley says that “if you walk into an R&D review and you ask people what new ideas they brought in from the outside and you tell them, ‘That’s great,’ you’ll accomplish your objective.”16 P&G’s Cloyd adds that monetizing contributions allows the company to reward innovators and imitators alike, as do the rules of induction to the Victor Mills Society, named after one of P&G’s all-time greatest innovators.17 To sidestep the stigma of imitation, Shackelford of Fifth Third Bank proposes substituting a term that will not raise negative connotations but will fulfill the objective of making imitation a positively reinforced endeavor. His favorite term: “imagineering.”18
Referencing: Beyond the Usual Suspects
The academic literature identifies three imitation tendencies based on the models selected. The first, labeled frequency-based imitation, is to imitate the most prevalent behavior within a given population, most often that of industry peers. The second, trait-based imitation, is to follow the behavior of firms most similar to one’s own—for example, those of the same size or market space. The third tendency, outcome-based imitation, is to imitate what seems to produce favorable outcomes.
The three tendencies are not mutually exclusive. For instance, the imitation of prestigious players, practiced by hospitals, hotels, and investment banks, is particularly likely when the models are also singled out as high performers. Having a global or national reputation increases the odds of becoming a model to be imitated, as does membership in one’s business group.
Large, prestigious, and successful firms are chosen not only on the assumption that following them will produce better results but also as a way to obtain a measure of legitimacy, something that is especially important during times of high uncertainty. Such pressures produce coercive isomorphism, whereas mimetic isomorphism is associated with copying successful players, and normative isomorphism is the following of industry standards and norms. The latter is amplified by what some call a bandwagon effect, wherein followers join early imitators.19
The three types of isomorphism often merge to form a strong imitation drive. A case in point is the adoption of Bismarck’s insurance program in the nineteenth century by European nations. It occurred as a result of its perceived success, the status of the innovator, the legitimacy it provided, and, for latecomers, the fact that it was rapidly becoming the norm.20
Substitute Global for Local Searches
The idea behind trait-based imitation is that the companies followed are relevant to a firm. These companies are often included in a benchmarked group, a practice that instantly positions them as potential imitation models, not least because the group becomes the yardstick against which executive performance is gauged.
Biologists caution that copying the most similar or most prestigious model might not be the best approach, because characteristics such as status and communication ability are not necessarily correlated with biological fitness; when focusing on similar species, organisms forfeit opportunities to imitate relevant but less visible others.21 In business, benchmarking draws attention to the more salient but possibly less important elements of the model firms at the expense of a deeper understanding of performance drivers. This practice is part of a broader tendency to conduct local rather than global searches—that is, to focus on others in the same industry, product category, and national environment. Conversely, “distant times, distant places, and failures” are overlooked.22
Firms also tend to look at recent events, based on the belief that these are the most relevant, a practice that has been observed in banks, hotels, hospitals, and nursing homes. Local searches are more intuitive, because the model and the imitator share a context and it appears that adjustment and customization will be minor. Local searches also tend to enjoy greater legitimacy, because they correspond to the search mode of similar players. However, they represent a potentially serious handicap because many innovations sprout far away from one’s industry, country, or region.23
Identify the Unusual Suspects
Les Wexner of The Limited recalls how in the 1970s he borrowed credit card processing technology from airline ticketing; now The Limited looks for ideas in firms ranging from Estée Lauder to P&G.24 The latter itself has studied the automotive and aircraft industries for ways to construe virtual computational models, says P&G’s Cloyd.25 Ohio Art’s William Killgallon says that his toy firm uses materials and new product ideas from the automotive industry.26 Nowell discloses that Frito-Lay looks at Federal Express for logistics tips to apply in its delivery business.27 Cardinal Health’s R. Kerry Clark recounts studying food distributors for ideas applicable to the medical supply business.28
The practice is becoming common: hotels copy loyalty programs from the airlines, banks adopt platform standardization from manufacturing, and hospitals borrow a page on safety from airlines, railroads, and the U.S. Navy. World Health Organization borrows from the aviation industry to develop guidelines to reduce infections. Skybus’s Bill Diffenderffer suggests that airlines and financial services firms should imitate each other, because both process a high volume of Internet-enabled standard transactions. Battelle’s Kohrt proposes venture capital firms as an imitation prospect because they are not bound by history or brand and look for practical solutions.29
Still, even the leaders of firms that look beyond their industry confines agree that it is not done systematically. Accenture proposes a formal process in its Customer Innovation Network, a facility where companies can find role models to imitate, but it remains to be seen whether the methodology can be helpful, especially given the need to contextualize discussed later in this chapter.30
For two decades, Southwest was considered “an idiosyncratic regional airline,” and it was only when it supplanted American Airlines in its San Jose hub that Southwest showed up on the radar screens of competitors, when it already had the scale and resources to defend itself from legacy carriers and new discounters.31 The same was true for Wal-Mart, with which the late Harry Cunningham, founder of Kmart, was happy to share knowledge, not thinking much of a small rural operator from Bentonville, Arkansas.32
The lesson is that today’s obscure players may be tomorrow’s winners, whereas today’s highfliers may disappoint tomorrow, precisely as the model companies featured in the bestseller In Search of Excellence underperformed their peers in the years after the book was published. A focus on high performers may lead imitators to not reference failing firms, those that Battelle’s Kohrt and Fischer call “worst in class.”33 According to Fifth Third’s Shackelford, even when executives look at failures, they don’t do it with the same intensity as they look at successful companies, and they distance themselves from failed models on the argument that “they don’t apply to us.”34
Yet failures provide a great learning experience. Not only do they teach humility, but also they reveal cause and effect, a crucial link in true imitation. “The only consultants I’ve ever hired in my 10 years [since reassuming Apple’s CEO post],” says Steve Jobs, is “to analyze Gateway’s retail strategy so I would not make some of the same mistakes they made [when launching retail stores].”35 By definition, you can’t investigate failed firms because they’re no longer around, but you can conduct a “business autopsy” using public information as well as talk to former executives who are no longer prohibited from divulging sensitive information. Near failures are especially valuable, because the firms still exist and the trauma is likely to be remembered well. Referencing failures is crucial for successful firms, because success tends to dampen search and trigger a monolithic, simplistic perspective.36
In going after the usual suspects, firms also miss the small players, which evidence shows are, on average, far more innovative. Fifth Third’s Shackelford notes that people look to small firms as models only when the latter are growing fast, and even then the preference is to acquire rather than imitate.37 The problem is that for a variety of reasons (e.g., regulatory regime, capital, valuation, integration challenges), an acquisition may not be a viable option.
Finally, it is important to reference innovator as well as imitator firms. You should study innovators because it will help you be a rapid second entrant or a differentiated late mover. You should also reference imitators to learn from their experiences, such as in overcoming deterrence. South Korean semiconductor manufacturers imitated Japanese firms, which previously referenced U.S. firms. Lee Byung Chul, Samsung’s chairman, targeted Toshiba because it “demonstrated how a latecomer can succeed with a clear target product segment and aggressive investment in manufacturing processes.38
Searching, Spotting, and Sorting: Zeroing In
Combing and scanning the environment for innovations are prerequisites for commercial success. P&G, with a cadre of nine thousand R&D staff, leverages its open innovation network to tap the ideas of a million and a half people annually; fifty employees across its businesses act as technology entrepreneurs, searching for ideas at scientific conventions and among supplier networks. Cloyd acknowledges that because “there are just too many good ideas,” it is one thing to have a wide reach but another to sort out the information.39 “In a world with so many ideas,” says The Limited’s Wexner, it is necessary “to filter things,” a theme echoed by Fifth Third’s Shackelford.40
However, this filtering is rarely, if ever, done systematically. Yet without “having the tools and procedures to scout for products/models,” says Stan Vriends of Carraro, there is little chance that the search will bring about the desired outcomes.41
Conduct Systematic Searches
The Wall Street Journal recently reviewed a book titled Under the Lid: A Fresh Sales Idea, but the idea described is anything but fresh. The author recalls how an enterprising woman by the name of Brownie Wise became inspired to sell Tupperware at social parties when she worked for Stanley Home Products, which pioneered the concept to sell cleaning supplies. Wise was alerted to the Tupperware potential by one of her Stanley protégés, who happened to stumble upon it.42
Good imitators don’t wait to be tipped off by someone or just get lucky. They know, as research has proved, that intelligence work is a vital predictor of imitation success. They establish search channels, including relationship-based venues. Like the imitators who descended on White Castle, recording everything from store design to operational routines, they develop scanning and information-gathering capabilities.43
Good imitators study their models obsessively: before starting Wal-Mart in 1962, Sam Walton visited Korvette’s and other discount stores and met with discount chain executives, including the heads of Spartan’s, Zayre, and Mammoth Mart. Walton showed up at Sol Price’s Fed-Mart armed with a micro cassette recorder and took detailed notes.44 Years later, Walton visited every Kmart store to learn from what was then a superior model. “I was in their stores constantly because they were the laboratory, and they were better than we were,” Walton said. “I spent a heck of a lot of time wandering through their stores talking to people trying to figure out how they did things.”45
In 2002, Yong-Jin Chung, executive VP of Korea’s E-Mart, led a group of merchandisers and buyers on a global tour. At one point they spent two days surveying a Wal-Mart store in Bentonville, recording such details as produce restocking time. E-Mart became a rational shopper, selecting elements from the United States, Japan, and Europe, among others, to come up with a Korean version of a discount retailer.
It is most feasible to conduct a systematic search when the models are well known and limited in number. For instance, Teva, global leader in generic drugs, has a team of 135 lawyers who are on the lookout for patent weaknesses, which imply openings for generics.46 Effective imitators develop collection and dissemination routines to benefit from the fidelity and reliability that come from repetition, an arduous process in industries such as machine tools and airframes, where product design is complex, lengthy, and expensive. It is, however, worthwhile: Vision researchers found that even though observation alone was sometimes sufficient to trigger imitation, repetition of observation and execution reduced reproduction errors significantly and can reduce the cost of dissemination and absorption, which represent 20 percent of the cost of technology transfer.47
Because outsiders are less likely to know about an imitation opportunity, it is tempting to think of members of the model organization as the primary source. However, relying on informants carries its own risks; senior executives may idealize the model or be too distanced from the field. It is vital to talk to people in the trenches, as Sam Walton did, and solicit additional data to be juxtaposed with informant information. Given the strategic risk of information being leaked to other would-be imitators, it is also important to limit intelligence gathering to trusted individuals. Last but not least, it is worthwhile, even when you are conducting systematic search, to keep an entrepreneurial spirit. Les Wexner of The Limited takes a month off every year to travel around the world, taking pictures and notes of anything that might be worth adopting back home.
Spot and Select
Spotting is the ability to identify and select the most promising imitation targets from a diverse pool. Effective spotting necessitates a dynamic process that simulates how a potential element might fit into the recipient system, and it requires people who are immersed in a company’s vision and are, most of all, curious.
Cardinal Health’s Clark says that spotters need to be technologically savvy to grasp opportunities embedded in a mentally distant model.48 They should be able to do forward engineering: just as reverse engineering involves reconstitution of the original process by which a product or a service has been put together, forward engineering requires the ability to visualize how an imitation would fit into an existing or future product, process, or model.
This task is especially challenging beyond industry confines—few employees have the knowledge to make sense of a potential target in another industry—but it can be rewarding. To get a sense of color schemes and styles, for example, Sherwin-Williams looks at the fabric and clothing industry and at designers such as Ralph Lauren and Martha Stewart. Cardinal Health swaps employees with Liz Claiborne as a way for the two firms to identify practices worth imitating. P&G does the same with Google to learn about the online world while Google learns about product features that entice consumers.
Contextualizing: Putting Imitation in Context
Contextualizing is about viewing imitation opportunities not as isolated atoms but as the interrelated parts of the complex system within which they are embedded and that explains, or conditions, their form and outcome. Vriends, the Carraro executive, notes that “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.49 This is akin to the adaptation of imported writing systems, in which certain letters were dropped to adjust for the lack of corresponding sounds, or to Japan’s and India’s imitation of the British postal system, which omitted practices that did not fit their social order, such as appointing women to head branch offices.50
Being aware of environmental differences is critical: national radio networks failed to imitate local radio because, among other reasons, the programming depended on local knowledge, which the networks lacked.51 Bill Diffenderffer of Skybus says that the airline’s backers did not understand that the United States lacked the dense European market served by Ryanair; they also did not see that passengers hailing from small Midwestern cities like Columbus, Ohio, were not ready to pay a premium for a JetBlue-style service in the way New Yorkers did.
In all these instances, failing to consider context was a key reason for failure. Even otherwise successful imitators may miss the point. For instance, Wal-Mart’s Walton initially did not grasp that the hypermarkets, an idea he brought from Brazil, flourished in Europe and South America because U.S.-style supermarkets and warehouse stores were not available there.52
Developing contextualizing capabilities requires jettisoning strategy jargon such as externalities and idiosyncrasies— which assign the environment a hypothetical, fringe role—and replacing them with region-, industry-, and company-specific thinking, which enables a rich and meaningful examination of an imitation target and its potential fit. To compensate for the failure of most business programs to provide context (as reflected in the disappearance of international business programs), firms need to train staff to proactively inject context when drawing lessons from prior imitations. Instead of creating abstract models and greatly oversimplifying a complex world based on a past-driven analysis, executives should learn how to capture environmental intricacies and develop the analytical skills that will enable them to tackle the correspondence problem.
Deep Diving: Reaching Beyond the Surface
Carl Kohrt, who led Kodak’s successful foray into China before becoming president and CEO of Battelle, recalls how his Chinese partners wanted to erect in balmy Xiamen a replica of Kodak’s Rochester facilities, complete with the massive roof designed to withstand Rochester’s heavy snowfall. Although this example sounds extreme, it is tempting to reduce information overload via “as is” copying. The approach may make sense in the case of a codified if complex system, as in the copy exact case, wherein semiconductor manufacturers produce a precise replica of their plants, complete with the paint on the walls just in case it makes a difference in the production process. But this tactic rarely works elsewhere, especially when a complex business model is concerned.
Wexner of The Limited concurs that people tend to look for easy, superficial answers to complex problems. Good imitators, he says, appreciate complexity. Weak imitators do not.53
Bill Diffenderffer recalls how Skybus investors wanted the airline to combine two working models—Southwest and Ryanair—into one, overlooking the contradictions (e.g., superior service versus lowest possible cost) inherent in the combination. Industry veterans and analysts who have noticed Southwest’s dominance in dense city-pair markets concluded that the point-to-point model was workable only in such markets, failing to realize that the airline’s low fare structure was the factor that made those markets high density to start with, and that Southwest’s greater productivity made short runs profitable.54 The analysis of the Southwest model was simplistic, confusing correlation with causality. As a Continental executive recounts, “We took 10 years of Southwest data and did regression. We said if we do x we’ll get y. We figured if we drop fares this much, we’d get this much traffic. But we didn’t factor in the traffic potential of the individual city pairs.”55
Decipher Cause and Effect
A focus on outcomes without an understanding of the means and process to produce them will lead to “blind imitation of the perceived survivors rather than a deliberate effort to construct causal theories about how to thrive,” according to J. Kim and A. Miner.56 This is not an easy task. For instance, Sherwin-Williams’ Chris Connor recalls how his company tried in vain to imitate a paintbrush made by a small competitor, Purdy, and after decades of futile attempts ended up acquiring the company.
Deep diving requires the development of capabilities, culture, and routines that enable sophisticated analysis of cause and effect. To decipher a complex model, the cognitive theory of directed imitation suggests decomposition, or the cognitive separation of an act into its separate aspects, selection of critical goal aspects, and hierarchical ordering of goals and means. Decomposition is done via behavior parsing, which segments an activity into its component parts and helps you comprehend, adopt, discharge, or substitute for elements based on their logical sequence.
By itself, parsing can be counterproductive if it leads to a neglect of the relationship among elements, and so it must be followed by architectural knowledge: the understanding of how the various components fit into a whole system, including interaction effects. Developing this knowledge requires that you examine the role of each component in the broader system, assess priorities, and identify key drivers. The process is intense and, although rigorous, is at the same time eclectic—precisely the process believed to lead to scientific innovation.57 In business, the process is especially challenging because one deals with “small histories” involving only few instances of experience.58
Implementing: Getting Imitation Done
Following Schumpeter, economists distinguish between invention and innovation, because invention does not have an impact until implemented. Just ask Xerox, whose PARC generated the computer graphic interface, the mouse, and the PDA—inventions that ended up benefiting others but not the company. Sam Walton made sure his borrowings worked by tirelessly trying them and their variants in his stores. E-Mart’s Chung did the same.
Don Shackelford notes that execution is in many ways the key capability in imitation. Zara, a European clothing company, he says, is copying the latest fashion trends and designs just like everyone else; its advantage lies in getting to market in four weeks whereas everyone else takes months.59 Successful imitation requires both an understanding of the actions of the model and the ability to replicate those actions. Indonesian banks failed to benefit from imitation opportunities because they did not plan for implementation; for instance, they did not prepare the accompanying routines.60
An implementation plan should take into account the capabilities of the imitating organization, including resources to be deployed or redeployed. When Continental Airlines started its Lite service, it moved sixty aircraft from mainline operations so hastily that spare parts were not available at airports, resulting in flight cancellations.61 Implementation is also about persistence: it took Sam Walton years to perfect his borrowings, and Microsoft went through four product releases before its Internet Explorer browser won the war against Netscape, the original.
Like other imitation processes, implementation benefits from the formation of interdisciplinary teams, each one bringing its own perspective into the mix. Whereas Kmart’s senior executives were all former store managers with the same background, Wal-Mart’s Walton scouted the country for experts in fields ranging from logistics to communications.62 This practice is essential now because of increasing complexity and a rise in the proportion of products, let alone models, that require multiple sources of expertise. To improve its Oil of Olay products, P&G put together staff from the skin care department (who understood the surfactants needed in facial cleansing) with people from the tissue and towel area (who brought in knowledge about substrates).63
Such teams also are more likely to adjust to a paradigm shift such as the generic revolution. According to Tom Ludlam of Prologue, the revolution meant that manufacturing cost and volume became the main drivers of profitability, but the cost-cutting, lean, aggressive attributes needed in a successful generics maker were exactly the opposite of what a pharmaceutical firm stood for: being intellectual and innovative.64 In a recent interview, Shlomo Yanai, CEO of Teva, the world’s leading generics maker, explained why he was not concerned with the decision by innovators to enter the generics market, saying that “you can’t take a Persian cat and educate it to become a street cat.”65
All told, the six capabilities discussed in this chapter are related and complementary. Without referencing, imitation either will not commence or will lead to the wrong search. Without scanning, searching, and sorting there will not be much to contextualize. And, in the absence of contextualization, deep diving cannot be properly conducted or, for that matter, implemented.
This should not be a rigid process. Imitation needs to be approached systematically but creatively, without losing sight of the intense, eclectic, and cyclical nature of the process. For example, spotting a potential idea usually leads to more scanning, as firms search for additional information (e.g., whether other competitors have already adopted it or are in possession of a better mousetrap), and early implementation problems may point to a need to return to deep diving to understand what went wrong. If this sounds much like innovation, it is: as I have argued, innovation and imitation have a lot in common, and competitive advantage depends on our ability to bring them together.
Takeaways
- Imitation capabilities can be developed, and their deployment is crucial to the success of imitation efforts.
- Imitation capabilities include readiness, referencing, searching/spotting/sorting, contextualizing, deep diving, and implementing.
- The imitation process should be systematic and yet eclectic and creative.