Imitate and thrive: Why copying better is the future of innovation

Good artists copy, great artists steal — Pablo Picasso

In May this year, Instagram launched Face Filters — a product feature originally made famous by Snapchat. Instagram users can now augment their faces with cat ears or dog faces. It’s not the first-time Instagram has copied its more youthful rival. A month earlier, Instagram Stories (again borrowed) surpassed Snapchat Stories by 40 million odd users. The stories feature, which enables temporary posts that disappear after 24 hours, is the essence of Snapchat. The disposable content feature was a game changer and a springboard to catapulting Snapchat into the lime light.

Instagram took almost three years to replicate their own stories feature, though in recent times the pace of its cloning has begun to accelerate. They copied Snapchat’s location filters in less than two years and customer stickers took only four months. Instagram is innovating via rapid copying, building an even more successful business out of replicating and improving competitor features and ideas.

When we hold brands up as being innovative, we usually focus on invention or disruptive innovation and less on brands that succeed by taking an existing idea or technology to more people than previous competitors. Apple wasn’t the first to invent the modern desktop computer, it was Xerox Parc, but Apple made it a commercial hit. Facebook didn’t invent social media, Friendster and Myspace came earlier, however Facebook brought social media to 2 billion+ users globally and out of the three is the last man standing. Is the simplest way to innovate to copy and improve the fastest?

Innovation can include combining, improving or building on existing ideas in new and interesting ways. Software and app technology is rapidly evolving, but most of the innovations we are seeing are just iterations of old ideas, granted highly successful ones. If some of the world’s greatest innovators from Apple to Facebook are building on existing ideas, maybe the key to a successful modern business is to stop inventing and start copying better and faster?

Innovation through rapid deployment: Rocket Internet

German-based company, Rocket Internet is considered to be a clone factory responsible for successfully copying some of the world’s most successful e-commerce businesses from eBay to Zappos to name a few. Without an original idea, Rocket is worth over 1 billion Euro.

Back in 1999, Rocket started Alando, a German copy of eBay. Within one hundred days of launching, the business was bought by eBay for US$38 million. Alando wasn’t the first eBay copy, in fact there were many German eBay clones at the time. What the three founding brothers of Rocket did was optimise and improve an existing idea very quickly to the degree that eBay saw them as a veritable competitor. This ‘identify, copy, optimise, grow and sell’ model is a blueprint they have continued to use.

Their model is built on efficiency of execution, they build faster and better than anyone, delivering business returns at lightning speed. By centralising functions such as IT, marketing and legal in Germany, Rocket benefits from having all of this expertise housed under one roof. These resources are easily redeployed for one business to the other when needed. This means that Rocket only has limited personnel on the ground in the growth markets, usually operations and customer service who are best placed to understand the specific market’s nuances and to communicate with customers.

Valued at over US$4 billion now, Rocket may not be inventing anything new, but it’s a thriving business structured to efficiently replicate other’s ideas. It’s this that makes it a hugely innovative company in its own right.

Innovation by combining existing ideas: WeChat

With an excess of 800 million active users, WeChat is the largest and most widely-used app and social network in China. Its success relies on its ‘app within an app’ experience, this in turn keeps its users on the app for longer. With millions of mini programs (as they are called) available — from messenger, mobile wallet, dating, picture posting, ride sharing, QR code readers, blogs, maps, games, online stores to name a few — users can run their whole lives in the platform.

What WeChat provides is an ecosystem of mini programs that are easily connected for users. It also makes it simple for developers to plug into centralised functions like mobile payment. If you’re living in China, you can message, book a restaurant, catch a taxi, split meal bills, send flowers, share photos and most importantly pay for it all without ever leaving the platform.

Rather than seeking to control this ecosystem, WeChat makes it easier and faster for developers to build and connect into the bigger platform, leading to frictionless integration of new ideas. For users, these mini-programs don’t even have to be downloaded, they can be discovered via QR codes in the real world and opened like a website leading to an even more fluid way of using the platform.

There is nothing inherently original about what WeChat offers, it offers an easy to use environment for app developers big and small to create apps that deliver to consumer needs, and if that involves copying well-established apps from around the world, all the better.

Imitate and thrive

The pace of innovation through technology has never been faster, there are more products and services than ever before and consumers have more options than ever. Innovation matters it’s what moves the world forward or just simply creates new products to buy, but innovation doesn’t always equal invention, we can’t all be the next Facebook or Google. More and more it’s the fast followers who are trumping the innovators, finding speedier ways to close the gap, but when it does catchup, it’s superior user base means those features touch more people.

Rocket Internet doesn’t invent new ideas, but the speed it’s able to copy and more importantly deploy means it’s been capable of besting companies it’s cloned. WeChat hasn’t really invented anything other than an open eco-system that makes it easy for developers to use, which in turn means others can innovate and adapt quickly for WeChat.

What does this mean for brands like Snapchat? Is the answer to stop innovating and start copying? Will it be consumers who lose out?

Right now, there has never been a better time to copy and thrive.