Design innovation strategy and imitation

In December I found an interesting article on incremental innovation. At the weekend I read a short article about Roberto Verganti’s and Claudio Dell’Era’s study Strategies of Innovation and Imitation of Product Languages (Journal of Product Innovation Management, No. 6, Nov 2007). They studied design intensive companies and used Italian furniture industry as their focus group.

Verganti and Dell’Era suggest that imitation is very expensive innovation strategy at least in design intensive furniture industry. They found very interesting inverese relationship between innovation strategy and the number of products. Verganti and Dell’Era speak about product signs and languague.

The empirical results illustrate an inverse relationship between innovativeness and heterogeneity of product signs and languages. Contrary to what is expected, innovators have lower heterogeneity of product languages. They tend to be strongly proactive and limit experimentations of new languages in the market.

Imitators, instead—which would be expected to have low variety since they can invest only in languages that have been proven successful in the market—tend on the contrary to have higher product variety. Eventually, by having lower investments in research on trends of sociocultural models, they miss the capability to interpret the complex evolution of products signs and languages in the market. (See full abstract)

One can find an analogy to online media also. Thinking online classified media for instance, it is very easy to imitate direct competitors or other industry benchmarks. If comparing players in the same markets you quite often find more similarities than differences between the products, layout and processes. However, the biggest success stories in last years has still been very focused innovations that took their place in the markets first and left imitators to cope with lower share.

In case of online media we have to either choose launch and see strategy or see and launch strategy the time to market is crucial. There is no time for winning wait and see strategy in our business. Verganti quotes Apple’s Steve Jobs, “Companies that do radical innovation do not listen to users; they eventually value market feedback, but first they propose things to the users.”

See Julia Hanna’s article in HBS Working Knowledge.

Photo above taken 2007 in Finnish furniture store.