Newsroom

An expert has suggested that imitating from successful competitors can improve your company’s innovation.

Boston Globe’s Drake Bennett also suggested that while the term imitation is unpopular the act of copying innovative ideas and taking them to the next level can benefit the market and your business.

“Invaluable though innovation may be, our relentless focus on it may be obscuring the value of its much-maligned relative, imitation,” said Bennett.

“Imitation has always had a faintly disreputable ring to it — presidents do not normally give speeches extolling the virtues of the copycat. But where innovation brings new things into the world, imitation spreads them; where innovators break the old mould, imitators perfect the new one; and while innovators can win big, imitators often win bigger.

“Indeed, what looks like innovation is often actually artful imitation — tech-savvy observers see Apple’s real genius not in how it creates new technologies (which it rarely does) but in how it synthesizes and packages existing ones.

“What some are finding is that it is a strategy that works much better than we think — whether for businesses, people, or animals competing in the wild. At its best, copying spreads knowledge and speeds the process by which insights and inventions are honed, eliminating dead-end approaches and saving time, effort, and money.”

If your business is working on a new idea try to find out how your competitors are attempting to solve the same problem, identify the strong and the weak bits in their idea and come up with a better solution yourself.

Sometimes their solution may be the best one at the moment. If this is the case there is no shame in employing more successful processes in your business just because someone else thought of them first.