ORIGINALITY IS OVER-RATED

 

“We watch our competitors, learn from them, see what they are doing for customers and copy those things as much as we can.”

 - Jeff Bezos Founder & CEO, Amazon

I like being original.  I like having new thoughts and developing new approaches to solve old problems.  I’m a big fan of Apple’s motto Think Different.  And I like shopping on amazon.com.

My personality tends to go against the natural grain of the white collar world I operate in (and it probably sometimes looks like I'm confirming to nonconformity because of it).

I also understand the cost of being different.

I’ve had potential clients tell me “How can I take advice from a guy using sunglasses on a cloudy day to hold back his long curly hair?”

I’ve invested weeks of my life to develop new solutions that never became viable products to sell (…at least not yet).

And I’ve worked with a lot of clients with very original ideas that ultimately failed because they just demanded too much habit change to attract a large enough audience.

DON’T POO-POO IMITATION

Big companies like Apple or Amazon tend to be recognized as innovators.  People celebrate their original thinking.

But these companies also tend to be pretty busy doing a lot of imitation…with improvement.  These companies are successful because they respect the competition and are quick to recognize what they’re doing right.

As most people know, the iPod was not the first MP3 player and many features in the newest iPhone already have existed in other smartphones.  Apple identifies good ideas and makes them better.

Amazon has been a phenomenal student of retail and of logistics.  They study the success of brick-and-mortar stores and the failures of fellow dot coms and constantly tweak their model based on what works.

These companies only create when they need to…and steal whenever they can.  They have demonstrated how innovators don’t always win in the long term because new ideas can be quickly and easily adopted by others.

Are you trying too hard to be innovative?  Are you trying to sell incremental improvement as innovation?  Do you have a healthy amount of respect (or fear) for your competition?

Don’t get caught up in the pursuit of innovation for the sake of innovation if you’re not already copying the best of what others are doing.

Be original when it is part of your DNA or the benefit is worth the price.  Copy when someone else has already figured out what works.