The Big Secret of Innovation | Opinion-Analysis

Mukesh Ambani, chairman of Reliance Industries Limited, recently announced JioMeet, a video conferencing tool similar to zoom. On social media, an Indian entrepreneur is panning him for a copy. One tweeted that it should have been called “Jhoom”. It is not Ambani who has not touched on how the technology industry works, but critics of Ambani. They do not understand the mechanism of technological innovation.

This may sound strange, but copies are good for innovation. Here’s how Chinese technology companies started by adapting Silicon Valley technologies for use in China and improving them. Chinese regularly monitor successful apps elsewhere and duplicate them before they start adding features or innovating. They learn from the best and improve.

That’s how Silicon Valley works, and Zoom is a knockoff for competing technologies like WebEx, Skype, and BlueJeans.

Steve Jobs built a Macintosh by copying the window interface from the Palo Alto Research Center. As he admitted in 1994, “Picasso had the adage that “a good artist copy, a great artist steals”. I have always been shameful about stealing great ideas. Almost all Apple products have features originally developed by others. That technology rarely occurs entirely in-house.

For example, the iPod was created by British inventor Kane Kramer. iTunes was built on the technology purchased from Soundjam. The iPhone often copies Samsung’s mobile technology, while Samsung copies Apple’s mobile technology.

Mark Zuckerberg is also copying Facebook from MySpace and Friendster to build Facebook and keeps copying the product. Facebook Places is a Foursquare replica. Messenger video mimics Skype. Facebook Stories is a clone of Snapchat. Facebook Live combines the great features of Meerkat and Periscope.

Zuckerberg is currently trying to copy WeChat by consolidating private messages, groups and payments. This is why he focuses on WhatsApp Payments being approved by Indian regulators. Before desperately buying the company, he desperately tried to copy WhatsApp, but failed many times. So he decided to buy the company, which had little revenue, for an incredible $20 billion, about 10% of Facebook’s market capitalization.

This is another Silicon Valley secret. If you can’t steal, buy a company.

By the way, they don’t call this copy or steal. It is called “knowledge sharing”. Silicon Valley boasts a very high turnover rate, with top engineers rarely working at a company for more than three years. They routinely join the competition or set up their own company. As long as the engineer doesn’t steal your computer code or design, you can build on your previous work. Silicon Valley companies understand that collaboration and competition can be successful at the same time. This is also reflected in the rare California law that prohibits non-compete agreements.

In most places, entrepreneurs are reluctant to tell others what they are doing. But in Silicon Valley, entrepreneurs know that sharing ideas can give them important feedback. Both sides learn by exchanging ideas and developing new ones. So when you step into a Palo Alto coffee shop, the people asked will feel free to tell you their product development plans.

But neither companies nor countries can succeed just by copying. They have to act very fast, keep improving themselves and adapt to changing markets and technologies.

Apple didn’t hesitate to cannibalize its technology, making it the most valuable company in the world. Jobs wasn’t worried that the iPad would negatively impact laptop sales or the iPhone music player would eliminate the need to purchase an iPod. The company made rapid progress as its competitors copied the design. I think Jio will do this too. Learn from the most effective in the Indian market and come out with better techniques.

However, there is a line here that should never be crossed: intellectual property theft. For example, Huawei in China has been sued to Cisco for “systematic and wholesale infringement of Cisco’s intellectual property.” The 5G technology may have been stolen from Nokia and others. Many cores of China’s cutting edge technology are based on such theft. This is by no means good for innovation and leads to even more destructive habits and the kind of blowbacks Huawei sees around the world as Huawei states countries have legitimately banned its technology.

My simple message to Indian entrepreneurs is to imitate before innovating, but don’t cross ethical boundaries.

Vivek Wadhwa is a prominent Fellow of the Harvard School of Work and Work-Life Program and co-author of the Incremental to Exponential: How Large Companies From the Future and Rethink Innovation, which will be published in September.

The expressed views are personal

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