omeone in India recently asked me what I thought about an innovation strategy featuring a heavy dose of "imitation." My response was, "Innovation isn't Olympic diving."What did I mean? An individual diver's scores for an event are a factor of two things: how well they execute their dive, and the "degree of difficulty" of their selected dive. The more twists and turns you have, the more points you can earn.
You don't get points for degree of difficulty for innovation. You get points for producing profits. Sometimes you do have to take higher risk, more uncertain approaches to produce those profits. But the goal isn't making things any more difficult than they need to be. The goal is to find the quickest, cheapest path to profits. If that involves imitation, then so be it.
To read the full, original article click on this link: With Innovation, You Don't Get Points for Difficulty - Bloomberg
Author: Scott Anthony
