Two weeks after it went on sale, the iPad is still the toast of the tech world, with its image gracing magazine covers, market analysts speculating about whether it will transform the worlds of publishing and entertainment, and consumers buying the gadget at a healthy clip. This at a cost of at least $500 each, at a time when Americans are still cautious about large nonessential purchases, and for a device that remains difficult to succinctly describe, much less figure out the purpose of.
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 mold, 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.
It’s also important, though, to remember that just because someone successful does something doesn’t mean it should be copied. After all, the practice may be a result rather than a cause of that success, or totally incidental to it. Bringing a ping-pong table into the office and encouraging employees to wear jeans won’t create a successful tech company any more than moving into a garret apartment and contracting tuberculosis will make someone a brilliant poet.
“You have to look further, and make sure you understand why something was successful, and whether its success applies,??? Shenkar says. And if it does, he argues, you rip it off as quickly as you can.
