Designing design thinking driven operations

   Could the growing acceptance of the Samwer brothers be due to the fact that people in the tech industry are finally admitting in public that imitation is good business? We decided to find out. We called up Oded Shenkar, the man who wrote the book on the business of clones: Copycats: How Smart Companies Use Imitation to Gain a Strategic Edge.

   “We have this reverence for innovation, but imitation is often the key to success," Shenkar explained. "Imitation was critical to human evolution, and today imitation is more critical than ever - because it’s much cheaper and more feasible than previously.

   When imitators execute well, they usually succeed better than the first movers, because they study the errors of the innovators and learn from them, as Facebook learned from the mistakes of MySpace.