Every year Les Wexner, the owner of Victoria"s Secret, a lingerie (女士内衣) retailer, takes a month off to travel the world looking for other companies" ideas to adopt. Mr. Wexner"s philosophy is that business should celebrate imitation.
That is almost a heresy. Businesses are told to innovate or die. Imitators are cast as the bad guys. But in the real world, companies copy and succeed. The iPod was not the first digital-music player; nor was the iPhone the first smartphone or the iPad the first tablet. Apple imitated others" products but made them far more appealing.
The pace and intensity of legal imitation has quickened in recent years, argues Oded Shenkar, a management professor at Ohio State University, in a provocative book, "Copycats: How Smart Companies Use Imitation to Gain a Strategic Edge".
History shows that imitators often end up winners. Who now remembers Chux, the first disposable nappies, whose thunder was stolen by Pampers Ray Kroc, who built McDonald"s, copied White Castle, inventor of the fast-food burger joint. Even magazine was just an imitator, noted Ted Levitt, one of the earliest management gurus to acknowledge the role of imitation. Copying is not only far commoner than innovation in business, wrote Levitt in the 1960s, but a surer route to growth and profits. According to "Copycats", studies show that imitators do at least as well and often better from any new product than innovators do. Followers have lower research-and-development costs, and less risk of failure because the product has already been market-tested. A study by Peter Golder and Gerard Tellis, "Pioneer Advantage: Marketing Logic or Marketing Legend", found that innovators captured only 7% of the market for their product over time.
Firms seldom admit to being copycats. But some businesspeople are willing to talk about the limitations of innovation. Kevin Rollins, a former chief executive of Dell, a computer-maker, asked, "If innovation is such a competitive weapon, why doesn"t it translate into profitability" But most remain obsessed with their own inventions. Copying is taboo. Praise and promotion do not go to employees who borrow from other firms.
As a result, firms pay insufficient attention to the art of copying. Levitt 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 " 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. By contrast, Asian companies—such as Panasonic, whose former parent, Matsua, was nicknamed manea 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. But that is not the immediate concern of corporations. Copying is here to stay; businesses may as well get good at it.
A. are too obsessed with innovation.
B. are actively involved in legal imitation.
C. discourage innovators" enthusiasm for innovation.
D. laugh last in market competition.
E. pay little attention to imitate rival"s success.
F. are slow to react to rival"s imitation.
G. explicitly discuss their suspicion about innovation. Kevin Rollin is one of few firm executive who