If you live in Europe, this article from California’s leading, Ivy-league university is worth a read. Check it out!

via Chris Tonetti: An Economist Shows How Imitation Can Sometimes Beat Innovation | Stanford Graduate School of Business

The article tends to write-off the continent of Europe as backward and slow to innovate, compared the likes of the US. It proposes an ‘imitation’ strategy for second tier companies and continents.

Just like the ‘Deep South‘ is very different to the Silicon Valley, so Europe has vast variation too. Actually, perhaps somebody should tell Stanford University that Europe is made up of a large number of independent countries, with different history, legal systems, ethnicity, economies, culture,  and politics.

Personally, I think that the Standford article misses an opportunity. At the personal level too, there are the ‘innovators’ or pioneers and there are the ‘imitators’ or ‘me too” people. I’ve met quite a lot of ‘me too’ characters in my career, and I think that they are just shallow impostors, trying to jump on the latest band-wagon – eventually they typically become ‘losers’.

So for me, the ‘imitation’ archetype seems shallow and just trying to leverage the ‘innovation’ archetype.

Seriously, is there any evidence that ‘imitators’ or ‘impostors’ actually achieve superior performance?

Thoughts?