Bestselling author Tom Peters tells us that, “Stealing from the best with pride,” is one of the best strategies we can adopt to leapfrog our competition, so that we can be leaders in innovation in our industry. This is also one of the tenets of LEAN Value Analysis™. With few exceptions, new ideas are really the recycling or improvement of old ideas, so you don’t need to be a genius to find, adapt, or deploy them. For example, Docutel Corporation, a small Texas upstart, first marketed the Automated Teller Machine in the late 1960s, which most of us use daily or weekly. But it was companies like IBM and NCR that made this idea a reality. Royal Crown Cola, not Coca Cola or Pepsi, was the company to introduce diet and decaffeinated colas. And the Diner’s Club was the first multi-purpose third party charge card, not American Express or Visa. Now, how can you apply this powerful concept of imitation to your value analysis strategies to create lasting value for your customers?

Our customers (internal/external) don’t care where new ideas come from; they just want to be delighted by superior products, services, and technologies that give them the best value for their purchasing dollar. Therefore, it is our job as value analysis practitioners to continuously monitor innovation in all industries and surpass the pioneers with their own ideas. One of the most famous success stories of imitation involves the microwave oven, which was invented by Raytheon during World War II. Yet, it was Japanese companies (Sharp, Sanyo, and Panasonic) who developed their own microwaves, based on Raytheon’s technology, that were priced much lower than Raytheon’s, that took the market away from American companies in the 1980s. The Japanese weren’t first with the new microwave technology, but in the minds of their customers, price became the main feature of a microwave product.

Steven P. Schnaars, an expert in imitation strategies, tells us that, “Nobody can successfully pursue an ‘imitate-and-improve strategy’ unless he or she makes sure to maintain ongoing research and development. For value analysis practitioners this means that you need to be constantly researching and educating yourself on new innovations. This needs to be done so that we can harvest the fruits that industry pioneers fail to harvest, and improve on them or adapt them to your organization (in whole or in part), at a fraction of the cost of the originator.

A case in point – the World Wide Web! The pioneers of the World Wide Web, which enables us to view a myriad of sources of information, collaboration, and e-commerce, were college professors and the U.S Government. But it is now being harvested by small businesses to advertise their products and services world-wide at a fraction of the cost of the originators. Small businesses can now compete with gigantic conglomerates on a level and low-cost playing field worldwide to reach new customers that they never dreamed of reaching before. This imitation strategy (the World Wide Web) should make it clear to you that your organization is never left out of the innovation game due to the lack of capital, labor, or other resources, since most of our innovation ideas are pioneered by small businesses who generally lack capital and labor to compete with the giants in their industry. Through creative imitation they consistently beat the giants at their own game…INNOVATION!