I look at it from other angles. Business people may talk lyrically about their mystical faith in innovation and the brave new world it is creating, but the driving force behind their constant innovation is far from utopian. In a vigorous economy, it is a matter of survival, pure and simple. Companies must innovate to stay competitive.
Competition, made up of two Latin words, cum and petere, means to seek together. What every businessman seeks is profit; he seeks it together with his competitors in the paradoxical relationship we call competition.
When a business loses money, it must innovate very quickly, and it cannot do so without foresight. Usually, there is neither the money nor the time for this. In this situation, business people with a strong survival instinct often reason as follows: “If our competitors are more successful than us, they must be doing something right. We must be doing it too, and the only practical way to do it is to imitate them as closely as we can”.
Most people would agree that imitation plays a role in economic recovery, but only in the first phase of the healing process. By imitating its successful competitors, an at-risk firm can innovate relative to itself; it will catch up with its rivals, but it will not invent anything really new. This common sense makes less sense than it sounds. For a start, is there such a thing as “absolute innovation”? In the first phase, no doubt, imitation will be rigid and short-sighted. It will have the ritual quality of external mediation. After a while, however, the novel element will become dominant in the competitor's practice and the imitation will become bolder. At that point, some additional improvement may “or may not” be generated which at first will seem insignificant, because it is not suggested by the model, but which really is the genuine innovation that will change things.
I am not denying the specificity of innovation. I am simply observing that, in a truly innovative process, namely, it is usually in such continuity with imitation that its presence can only be discovered after the fact, through a process of abstraction. Not so long ago, in Europe, Americans were portrayed primarily as imitators “good technicians, no doubt, but the real brain power was in Germany or England”. Then, within a very few years, the Americans became the great innovators.
Public opinion is always surprised to see the modest imitators of one generation become the bold innovators of the next. The constant recurrence of this phenomenon should have something to teach us.
Until very recently, the Japanese were reduced to mere copycats of Western ways, incapable of true invention in any field. They are now the driving force behind innovation in more and more technical fields. When did they acquire the inventive spark they supposedly lacked? At this very moment, the Japanese “Korean, Taiwanese” imitators are repeating the same process. Didn't something similar already happen in the 19th century, when Germany first rivalled England, and then surpassed it in industrial power? The metamorphosis of imitators into innovators happens repeatedly, but we always react to it with amazement. Perhaps we don't want to know about the role of imitation in innovation.
“It is easier to imitate than to innovate”. This is what the manuals tell us. But the truth is that the only shortcut to innovation is imitation; and here is another phrase that illustrates the meaning of innovation: “many people actually imitate when they think they innovate”. This cannot be denied, but it should be added that “many people innovate when they think they imitate”.
Yes. But, business isn't the true application of competition, is it? Competition can be like two sprinters trying to be the fastest runner. They can push each other to be their individual best, not to beat the other, but to be that best.
Business for profit is about beating the other, not about being the best.
Do you believe this to be true? I do not.
And, I will add that all of your examples, are from periods of time prior to mass media and the internet. There is far more homogenization of thought now, which is what I am actually talking about in the article piece. This homogenization changes the normal distribution of people playing in the creative fields, narrowing the pool of the next iteration of innovators, and the range their innovations will take.
Our views of the world are at odds with each other, they certainly diverge because your experience and mine are totally different. I have gone from a third world culture to a first world culture. My personal experience has been nourished by North American currents and certain European countries, this year I hope to visit the colossus of Asia “China”.
I maintain that America is the GREAT innovator and China, for example, is the great IMITATOR, but I recognise that within that imitation is the personal touch of its A, B, C and junk qualities, heh, heh, heh.
I do not share the idea that world thinking has become homogenised or globalised. Furthermore, I am particularly inclined to say that this is a trick that certain interests have wanted to implant in people's brains. The past to which you refer has led us to the present we live in. The internet is only an intangible medium, the reality is more palpable and crude. Passivity is sickening and impoverishing the human being.