TOW#520 — Creative imitation
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If you’ve ever been to a lecture or read a book on entrepreneurship, business development or management, then you’ve certainly heard everyone saying that the future is in innovation and development in creative thinking companies. If you want to be special, different from the competition and want your business to have a better chance of survival, you must develop innovative solutions for your business. However, that’s very easy to say in theory, but working that way in practice is either very difficult to implement or entrepreneurs don’t know exactly what it means.
What does innovation actually mean anyway?! Innovation means developing a new idea, method or technical solution that has previously not been seen, heard of or used. And herein lies the biggest problem for entrepreneurs. They’re afraid that they must always invent something new and unprecedented in order to have a successful business. In general, it simply can’t really work in practice. Imagine where this world would be if we were all able to constantly innovate new, never-before-seen solutions.
In order to provide a simpler view and solutions for business development, one shouldn’t really think about inventing something that doesn’t exist, but should see what already exists and improve it.
That’s essentially what is meant by the term ‘CREATIVE IMAGINATION’.
If you look around at what companies are actually doing, you’ll find that they’re not in fact constantly innovating something totally new. The thing that’s most common in business is imitation — take something that already works and make it better.
A simple way to define ‘creative imitation’ is as a way of working, a strategy or a developed solution which copies from something that already exists, but is tweaked in a way that makes it specific to you. When I talk about imitation, I don’t mean simply imitating an already existing solution. That’s copying. ‘Creative imitation’ means that we’re adding or changing something to an existing solution that will make it much more efficient and productive.
- There were search engines before Google, but they made it work better and give better results;
- There were computers, phones and music devices before Apple, but they created a new style, and new ways for both technology and businesses to function in general;
- There were coffee shops before Starbucks, but they created a cult around coffee;
- IBM entered the computer business as an imitator, and is today one of the biggest players in IT;
- Playboy also started out as an imitator, and now represents a whole new industry in publishing.
It’s often the case that the ‘imitator’ is more able than the innovator to predict what is best for a product or service, or how to adapt it better to the market in order to achieve better results. Every innovation is a result of the time in which it appeared, as well as the societal structure and development. Also, just because something’s created at a particular time doesn’t mean that it’s immediately fully applicable. Only after a while, when most people can understand it, does it gain functionality and meaning. It goes without saying that Nikola Tesla’s work is a prime example, since his innovations and imitations of his solutions are more widely understood and used today than in his time.
Everything’s already been invented! You don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Don’t waste time and energy ‘inventing’ something never seen before. Just think about how to make the things that already exist better, more efficient, more economical and more functional.
Wishing you success with the changes to come,
Petar Lazarov
Member of the Team
MACEDONIA-EXPORT Consulting
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