Depending on how it is done, innovation can have a very
brief shelf life. If your firm depends
on novelty to sustain its market, anything “new” quickly loses its flavor. This is particularly true when competitors
notice that a firm has discovered something that excites the market and move
quickly to imitate it. In a very short
amount of time, the quality that was unusual and unique to one specific brand
becomes ubiquitous and everyone is offering it.
There are, of course, some protections afforded to
manufacturers to give them exclusive demesne over a slightly differentiated
product – but since business has gone global, these protections have no
teeth. It’s nearly impossible to
prevent a manufacturer on the other side of the globe, or even on the other
side of a political border, from copying a product. Even manufacturers in the same nation,
subject to the same legal system, are quite adept at finding loopholes that
enable them to adopt and imitate any quality that customers find attractive.
In such an environment, innovation gives a company only a
short-term advantage: it enjoys consumer preference between the moment it
delivers something unique to the market and the moment its competitors take
away this advantage by replicating that quality. Hence, the constant atmosphere of panic at
many firms to “innovate or die” is an attempt to constantly stay a step ahead
of imitators that are hot on their heels.
But all of this is predicated on certain premises: that the
competitors recognize the value of the innovation and wish to imitate it. Particularly in an atmosphere in which
innovation has become rampant, there is much greater value in being able to
evaluate innovation than to be nimble in imitating it. Not all new ideas are good ideas, and
quickly imitating a bad idea can be devastating – as such an evaluative step is
critical.
And this provides an opportunity for sustainable innovation:
an idea whose value is seen by the market, but whose profitability is missed or
underestimated by competitors. It is
impossible to conceive of an innovation that cannot be imitated – but rather
simple to conceive of one that will not be imitated.
An entrepreneur is defined by his willingness to take risks
that others will not, to bring something “new” to the marketplace that
customers will find more appealing than existing options. The
difference between the successful entrepreneur and the dilettante whose ideas
result in a string of failures is in the ability to preform an accurate assessment
and prediction. And the ability of the entrepreneur
to stay ahead of his competition is in seeing the value that they do not. Their lack of vision is its own impediment.
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