By
Boniface Okanga
London-England, 2 September, 2024
Invention of original product ideas is essential for creating unique products that bolster a firm’s overall competitiveness. But as competition heightens to generate more aggressive innovation wars, it often becomes difficult for the business to easily come up with a series of new ideas that can be quickly implemented to respond to the disruptive products being unleashed by rivals. In such situations, risks of running out of ideas or coming up with half-baked ideas can become quite common. As competitors engage in aggressive innovation wars characterised by innovation and counter-innovation introducing more disruptive features and attributes, even the resources and budget dedicated for research and innovation can also get overstretched. This affects the successful invention and implementation of an array of new ideas to counter the emerging disruptive new product features.
To therefore survive and remain relevant as more radical product changes are explored for a business to outwit competition once and for all, some aspects of copying and pasting often become quite common not only among the emerging businesses, but also among the established incumbents. Despite being the dominant market player, the established incumbents may engage in some copying and pasting of the emerging rivals’ products or the most attractive features as a way of destroying the emerging disrupters.
Incumbents may also copy and paste each others’ product features as a way of surviving and remaining relevant in the competition game as more radical disruptive new products are invented. In effect, though copying and pasting product ideas are widely discouraged, learning and imitation have still turned out as some of the best strategies for a firm to acquire, explore, build and develop its innovative capabilities. Such a process enables a firm learn, explore and improve the identified product concept. With time, this improves the innovative capabilities of the business to innovate and emerge with its own product ideas.
Most of the best performing products are often more sophisticated. To therefore edge out rivals using such products to reshape the existing business terrain to their advantage, learning and imitation offer chance for the business to imitate and just tweak the product a bit to counter the rivals’ disruptive activities. It is through such initiatives that the business improves the attractiveness of its product features and attributes to counter competition and remain relevant in the innovation war game as it is explores the invention of a more disruptive strategy. For the emerging new innovation firms, learning and imitation are some of the strategies for improving a firm’s innovative capabilities. It enables innovation firms identify, explore and improve new ideas extracted from the existing rivals’ product ideas. For new firms that do not aim to invest enormously in R&D (Research & Development) to innovate and develop new product/service ideas of their own, learning and imitation are often some of the options that the business can use.
Learning and imitation enable innovation firms minimise the hefty innovation costs required for innovating and developing the product/service from scratch. Because the product ideas already exist, it becomes easier for the business to explore and discern how such a concept can be improved. Usually it is just upon the imitating business to evaluate and understand the ingredients and components used for the creation of such products. This tends to be easier and less costly as compared to the hefty experimentation costs and wastes which are often required for the development of a new product from scratch.
Learning and imitation not only save costs, but also innovation turnaround time as well as time to market. While copying product ideas from the existing products, it becomes easier for the imitating business to understand the aspects of the product that the customers are impressed or less impressed with. This creates the opportunities for the business to discern how the product can be tweaked a bit by adding new features, quality and functionality to differentiate the product from the existing one. Like the video below on the cases in China indicate, learning and imitation are some of the paths to innovation. The video below indicates, it enables the imitating business learn, copy and build the product as it develops capabilities to innovate and create its own products.
Quite often imitators are scorned and pitied for engaging in unethical business activities. However, in most cases, the emerging imitators are the businesses to watch out. They start as struggling businesses without clear understanding of the product components and manufacturing processes and technology only to produce fake products of poor quality. With time, through continuous improvement, imitators get to understand the product better than even its original inventors. This improved understanding enables imitators to discern new knowledge, technology and ideas that must be added to ensure the product generates quality and features that displace the original products from which such ideas were extracted. In the initial stage of imitation, imitators cause the decline of sales, revenue and profitability.
During such situations, some of the consumers opt for cheaper counterfeit versions of the original product with the hope that with time the price of the originals will come down. Using continuous improvement, the imitators with time not only directly duplicate the product, but also engage in the radical modification of the product with the motive of creating what they call “a new product” to completely displace the originally copied product from the market.
Hence learning and imitation are not just the strategic processes of copying and pasting product ideas, but also the processes of evaluating and discerning how the existing product can be created with tweaked versions to displace the original product from the market. For that reason, learning and imitation as part of the innovation strategies may take the form of cloning or usage of reverse-engineering that leads to the creation of the same, similar or the modified versions of the existing products.
Cloning
Cloning is a direct copying, pasting and usage of product or business model ideas from other businesses to create similar products/services that can generate the required sales, revenue and profits. It is the direct process of duplicating and creating the same products using the same ingredients, components, technology and knowledge. Cloning can be threatening due to the direct infringement of copyrights and intellectual property rights laws, but most of the businesses still use it to clone and generate the required sales from the bestselling products. Cloning is mainly used in China to duplicate and create more superior bestselling brands like Harley-Davidson or other brands of smartphones. It is often used in markets where laws against copyrights’ breaches are less stringent.
Despite how stringent the copyright laws could be, cloning is still used by most of the businesses to clone and sell the bestselling products. For innovative businesses aspiring to further develop and grow, cloning is often used as the foundation for understanding the complex processes for developing a more sophisticated product. With time, the business evolves from just cloning to the development of its own product concept. One of the best cases of business cloning is reflected in the creation of FEDEX that replicated UPS’ business model with all its products and services.
With time, FEDEX introduced some bit of tweaking to create and offer additional features and services that UPS was not offering. In the 1970s, UPS had created a sort of oligopoly system in the US mail delivery system (Stanley & Sotolongo, 2021). This caused poor services as punctuated by higher prices, damage to customer goods and other forms of operational inefficiencies and delays that affected customer satisfaction with UPS services. Frederick W Smith, a Yale student at the time, being aware of such dynamics in the mail delivery industry, developed a business model for a nation-wide package transportation system.
Though the business model appeared original, it was largely the cloning of the UPS business model. To create some difference that would entice customers to shift from using UPS services to adopting FEDEX, Smith tweaked the business model a bit by introducing the usage of modern technologies like information technology, internet as well as the use of modern aeroplanes and ships to ensure the faster delivery of the required packages and mails across the world (Stanley & Sotolongo, 2021).
Since cloning requires the imitator to have even more money as well as better technology and skills than the incumbent, FEDEX struggled with the cloning process. But with time, it emerged with a successful business model that it tweaked to offer more efficient domestic package transportation, overnight delivery services, international transportation services and shipping. As these improved the success of FEDEX in the way that completely disrupted UPS’ operations, the video below suggests it then became the turn of UPS to begin copying and pasting some of FEDEX’s best practices as the way of surviving and thriving into the future (Agarwal & Deborah, 2024).
In otherwords, cloning is not only done by the emerging new businesses, but also sometimes by the incumbents as part of the defensive or even offensive strategies to retain market leadership. Such a situation is reflected in the Facebook-Snapchat case. Of course, Facebook is a pioneer incumbent in the social media business or industry. However, as Facebook was trying to fix issues associated with its news feed issues, an upstart operator in the social media industry emerged in the names of Snapchat (Kantrowitz, 2024).
Snapchat, a messaging app developed by Evan Spiegel, a Stanford graduate, was of course a copycat of the Facebook’s business concept of developing, posting and sharing stories. Whilst mainly accomplishing such functions, Snapchat was tweaked to only permit the generation, posting and sharing of videos and photos that would disappear in 24 hours after sharing with only friends. This contrasted with Facebook’s approach where posted videos or texts would go to everyone on Facebook and stick forever to thereby infringe on some of the users’ privacy.
As millions and millions of social media users opted for Snapchat instead of Facebook, Snapchat was identified to represent an “existential threat” to Facebook. For that reason, Facebook acquired Instagram and developed stories that were complete duplicates or clones of Snapchat stories. Combined with the introduction of Reels, this weakened Snapchat to render it one of the worst performing social media operators in recent years (Newton, 2021). Though Facebook is being accused of anti-competition behaviours, it has made cloning or direct copying and pasting of the emerging rivals’ business models and technologies part of its strategies for identifying and destroying the emerging potential disrupters. When TikTok became a challenge with the use of more appealing short videos, Facebook and Instagram introduced Instagram Reels to permit its global audience to create, post and share videos (Chang et al., 2021).
Though such a strategy has enabled Facebook to counter TikTok threats, Facebook still needs to explore better ways of countering TikTok since it seems like TikTok has not yet been subdued. Facebook’s case indicates the extent to which direct copying, pasting and replicating product ideas from other businesses is not only a preserve for the less capable market followers or the emerging new businesses, but also an initiative that can be undertaken by big established incumbent market leaders as a strategy for countering and destroying the emerging new disrupters.
Copying and pasting the emerging new disrupters often destroy their capabilities to emerge and reshape the nature of the industry game to their advantage. As Facebook copied Snapchat, it disadvantaged Snapchat which would have been Facebook’s destroyer if the copying and pasting strategy had not been used. In that process, the cases of copying and pasting are not only reflected in Facebook’s stories, but also in the counter copying and pasting accusations raised in a series of Apple-Samsung Cases.
Apple-Samsung Cases
Apple-Samsung Cases depict the accurate reflection of how copying and pasting can be used as the strategy for gaining new innovation insights before a business can depart to engage in the unique invention and creation of its own unique products and services. Cases of Apple-Samsung copying and pasting also signify to successfully copy, imitate and replicate an innovation idea, the copying business must have knowledge, skills and technological supremacy as well as financial resources that match or even far surpass the capabilities and resources possessed by the business to be copied (ECOATM, 2024).
Unfortunately, the case of Apple-Samsung copying and pasting is often put as if it is easy to successfully copy, paste and replicate new product ideas. It is also put as if it is only Samsung who is a bad guy here just sitting, drinking coffee and waiting for Apple to invent new ideas so that it can copy. Though the focus of this analysis is to use Apple-Samsung Cases to illustrate how copying and pasting or cloning can be an innovation strategy or a market strategy for leveraging and countering competition, it is also such biasness that this analysis seeks to correct. Just like Apple, Samsung has been one of the biggest players in the global telecommunication and consumer electronics segment since the 1960s.
Engaging in both the direct frontal attack and behind the scene games aimed at creating and supplying some of its major global partners with unique components for computers, smartphones and other electronic devices’ components, Samsung subsequently emerged not just as one of Apple’s major suppliers, but also as the current biggest competitor and semi-conductor supplier that Apple cannot afford to do away with. When Samsung argued in their case before the US court Judge that their smartphone development was not a copy and pasting initiative, but a concept that emerged from extensive years of investment and engagement in research and development (R&D), the video below suggests it is only Samsung that knew what it was talking about.
Though the Judge did not concur with Samsung’s argument on the basis of lack of legal evidence, a critical analysis of Geoffrey Cain’s (2020) book titled: “The Inside Story of the South Korean Giant That Set Out to Beat Apple and Conquer Tech” would accentuate the argument that Samsung knew what they were talking about. Further analysis of Samsung’s general historical evolution and development in the global telecommunication and consumer electronics segment would also further echo the argument that when Samsung argued that their smartphone concept emerged from years of research and innovation, they actually knew what they were talking about. Of course incumbent market players are often displaced by disruptive new comers, but when Apple was created in 1976 to develop and market Apple 1’s personal computers, Samsung was already one of the most important players in the global telecommunication and consumer electronics segment. Initially, Samsung, a South Korean-based manufacturing conglomerate was created in 1938 by Lee Byung-Chul as just a trading company dealing in food processing, retail, insurance, textiles and securities.
Though often de-campaigned as a Japanese or Chinese-based multinational manufacturer making and selling cheap smartphones, Samsung, a South Korean created company evolved through research and innovation from just its Suwon-based operations into not just the Seoul-based operator, but also into a multinational business operating across segments like construction, shipbuilding, and manufacturing and sale of telecommunication hardware.
Recognising the future roles that the advancement in telecommunication and consumer electronics technology would play in the future global societies, Samsung, in the 1960s, created its industrial affiliates which included Samsung Electronics that as per 2017 rating became the biggest player in the global information technology, consumer electronics and semi-conductor making industry. To further improve the positioning of itself as a critical player in the global telecommunication and consumer electronics segment, Samsung created divisions like Samsung Electronics’ Devices, Samsung Corning, Samsung Semiconductor and Telecommunication and Samsung Electro-Mechanics.
When Apple was still struggling to create and introduce its first computers-Apple 1 Personal Computer in 1976, Samsung had already produced its first black-and-white TV in 1970. From TV innovation, Samsung created Tongyang Broadcasting Company which used its radio and television technologies to relay several communications and messages to the public. Apple created its Apple 1 and 11. In a move that makes it appear that this thing of Apple-Samsung copying and pasting each other has been there for as long they have been in existence, Samsung extended its operations from making TVs to creating its first computer SPC-1000 in 1982. Samsung’s computer technology that used audio cassette tape to load and save data to the floppy drive option emerged to be the technology that influenced the emergence of the current non-destroyable Samsung-Apple relationship.
During the same period, Samsung also began to engage in the manufacturing of telecommunications hardware like switchboards. After the center was converted into a facility for telephone and fax manufacturing systems, it was subsequently changed to Samsung mobile phone manufacturing facility that has created over 800 million smartphones so far. To expand across the world, Samsung not only increased its investment to create and deliver the best inputs and hardware for various telecommunication and consumer electronics equipment and devices, but also constructed a TV assembling plant in Tokyo, England, Texas, Portugal and New York.
As Samsung excelled in the creation and sale of TVs, it also got recognised across the world as one of the biggest suppliers of semi-conductors as well as one of the best operators in the global telecommunication and consumer electronics segment just like Sony. When Samsung evolved through all the dynamics into the age of cellphone making and subsequently smartphone manufacturing, it were such capabilities that attracted not only the attention of Apple, but also the other operators in the cellphone and smartphone manufacturing industry.
Genesis of Samsung/Apple Cloning Conflicts
Confident of its capabilities, Geoffrey Cain revealed Chang-Gyu Hwang, who was Samsung’s President for Semiconductor and Memory Business to have pocketed Samsung made flash memory and travelled from Seoul in 2005 to Palo Alto to meet Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO at the time. Flash memory was a device that offered more lightweight and efficient storage device than the traditional hard drive. During that period, Apple was working on the creation of the iPod and flash memory was and is still importantly required for usage in iPod. Impressed by Samsung’s new invention that displaced the traditional hard drive as well as Samsung’s unique capabilities to manufacture and supply multitudes of the required flash memory devices, Steve Jobs being Steve Jobs that everyone knows to demand and offer the best for the customers, gave Samsung the contract as the sole supplier of the flash memory for the iPod.
Samsung moved from the supply of just flash memory to being Apple’s biggest and most reliable supplier of semi-conductors and subsequently the major dominator in the US semiconductor market. It also started supplying Apple with display screens, and lightweight flash memory (ECOATM, 2024). With Samsung being one of the major suppliers of the components that Apple uses for making its smartphones, it was just a matter of time before Samsung accurately understood what it takes in terms of the required components, resources, skills and technology to make premium quality smartphones.
In effect, in 2009, Samsung introduced Samsung GT-17500 Galaxy as its first smartphone. In the past, Samsung had been a manufacturer and seller of cellphones but not to the scale that it was propelled after the introduction of Samsung Galaxy. Since Samsung Galaxy was however criticized as the copycat of iPhone, it was the introduction of the Galaxy that caused Samsung’s reconfiguration from just Apple’s supplier to Apple’s supplier, copier and competitor at the same time. Incensed by Samsung’s betrayal, Steve Jobs threatened to launch a “thermonuclear war” on Android as the operating system being used by Samsung phones, but was cautioned by Apple’s senior executives to take a more civil and cautious approach to avoid damaging relationship with the most important supplier.
Since then, it has turned difficult for Apple to get rid of Samsung because despite being a competitor, Samsung still remains one of Apple’s biggest suppliers. Given Samsung’s in-depth understanding of the processes and technology of premium smartphone manufacturing, it had the confidence of not only copying iPhone and remaining a supplier, but also of even counter-accusing Apple of copying and cloning some of the features from its smartphones. Though the Northern California District Court relied on the decision of the lay jury who do not even understand anything about smartphone development, it concluded Samsung to have infringed on Apple’s utility patents on iPhone’s “bounce-back-effect”, “on-screen navigation”, and “tap to zoom functions”. For design functions, Samsung was found to have copied Apple’s iPhone’s features like “home button”, “rounded corners”, “tapered edges”, and “on-screen icons”.
Though Samsung had also counter accused Apple for infringing on four of its patents, the court rejected such a claim just as it did for Apple’s claim that Samsung had infringed the ornamental design as covered by Samsung’s design patent. However, after sometimes, the United States Patent and Trademark Office dismissed the court’s ruling. But Samsung’s overall entry into the smartphone manufacturing industry instigated not only innovation wars, but also patent and legal wars. Instead of being creative to disadvantage the other on the basis of high level of differentiation derived from higher levels of creativity and innovativeness, Apple first opted for the use of a series of legal suits attracting hefty fines and reputation damaging accusations as part of the strategies of financially disadvantaging Samsung.
However, since such a strategy seems not to be working as Samsung has become more resilient and immune to patent disputes and accusations; it is now the winner of the innovation war that will define the future rules of the game in the global telecommunication and consumer electronics industry. Whether or not Samsung copied Apple, it is evident that it was still through some learning and imitation of Apple’s smartphone design and development processes that Samsung was able to acquire, build and develop the unique capabilities to develop and sell smartphones of its own brands.
The effect is that as Samsung gained capabilities to become one of the most disruptive players in the global telecommunication and consumer electronics segment even Apple in one way or another started copying and modifying some features from Samsung’s smartphones (ECOATM, 2024). Prior to Samsung’s entrance, Apple had used its iPod 3G to revolutionise the global smartphone making industry with the advertisement message that an iPod is not just an iPod, “but a combination of iPod, an internet device and a mobile phone”. The market exploded and Apple experienced sales to the tune of 6.9 million iPod 3G units just sold in the financial year 2007/2008. It was such figures that convinced major players like Samsung that smartphone manufacturing and development was the way to go. To respond to such opportunities, Samsung unleashed its Galaxy S in 2009.
Though amid accusations of some copying, Samsung significantly differentiated its smartphones from Apples by creating Galaxy S exhibiting the more admirable larger 4-inch screen display, slimmer body, 5MP Camera, 720p Video Recording and super active-matrix organic light emitting diode screen(ECOATM, 2024). With more improved understanding of the dynamics of premium smartphone development and manufacturing, Samsung now a well-developed smartphone manufacturer further continued its direct attack on Apple by releasing more disruptive brands like Samsung Galaxy S111 and S4 Models. Galaxy S111 and S4 Models had new modifications like floating touch that permits hovering the finger over the screen instead of touching and smart PauseTM that allowed pausing video just by looking away.
To stand tall in such an aggressive innovation war, Apple retaliated to defend its market position and leadership by introducing iPhone 5 embedded with iCloud and Apple’s Voice Assistant. In a move that somehow copied Samsung’s disruptive features, Apple increased the display sizes to 4 inches on its 5c and 5s Phones in contrast to Samsung Galaxy S4’s 5 Inches. For the first time in its 5s, Apple integrated bit chip, Touch ID that converted home button into the unlocking fingerprint scanner, camera’s low light performance and iOS interface (ECOATM, 2024).
In retaliation in 2016, Samsung responded with vigor that depicted its new creativity and innovation prowess and power to counter any disruptive competition by improving its Galaxy S5 to integrate more flashy features, video performance improvements and premium designs. In such improvements, Samsung Galaxy S5 and subsequently its S7 and S7 Edge were modified to integrate more flashy features like waterproofing, micro-USB 3.0 charging port, swipe-based fingerprint reader, dual-pixel autofocus and super wide lens for night photography. Even as such innovation wars continue to unfold with Samsung releasing its Galaxy Z Fold and Z Flip while Apple unleashed its iPhone XS and XS Max in 2023 and the 2020 redone iPhone SE, one of the common things in all these innovation wars have been the taking and modifying of each other’s features to create additional new features and functionalities (ECOATM, 2024). With significant strides and successes that Samsung has attained, the video below implies by adopting learning and imitation not just as an endless strategy, but also as a learning and experimentation exercise, the business can build innovation capabilities to turn from just the imitator to the market leader.
It is not just through cloning or copying and pasting that learning and imitation is used as the strategy for building and improving a firm’s innovative capabilities, but also through reverse engineering.
Reverse-Engineering
Reverse-engineering is one of the strategies through which businesses can learn and imitate a particular well-performing product of interest. It is often used as part of the strategies through which R&D personnel can evaluate, unpack and understand the components and processes used in the creation of a particular product. It is through such initiatives that the business gets to understand the competitive strengths and weaknesses of rival products. It is through the evaluation of the components used in the making of the product that it becomes easier for the business to understand the technology, resources, skills and competencies that would be required to create and deliver either a similar product or even a better product that serves the same functions. Reverse-engineering is quite essential for improving the capabilities of the business to understand the nature and complexities associated with the actual making of the product before venturing into the process of creating and selling such products.
Quite often, the analysis of the competition strengths and weaknesses has entailed the evaluation of just the nature of business structure, strategy, processes, resources, skills and competencies used in the making of rival products. However, reverse-engineering takes and examines a specific product to discern the components used as well as the technological capabilities and resources that would be required for making such products. Reverse-engineering is not just a random process, but a strategic logical exercise that unfolds according to six steps encompassing prescreening, research, disassembly, analysis and evaluation, reassembly and creation (Glassburn, 2022).
Prescreening is the identification of the type and nature of the product which is going to be re-engineered as well as the areas that will be the focus of the reverse engineering exercise. It informs the business about the types of skills, technology and resources that will be required during the reverse-engineering exercise. Just like the process of making and manufacturing the product, the reverse engineering exercise is also a very complex exercise that requires accurate analysis and understanding of the product before any re-engineering exercise is accomplished. This explains why after prescreening, research is undertaken to gather, evaluate and understand more information about the product.
Research requires gathering all the relevant information on how the product was made. It may entail usage of both ethical and unethical practices of buying the concept documents/notes from the rival company’s unscrupulous employees. It involves evaluation and extraction of all the codes and detailed information on how the product was made. After the product has been completely understood, the process of disassembly often commences by deconstructing the product to discern the actual components used as well as the reasons why such components were used(Glassburn, 2022). This must be accompanied with the evaluation of how the components used leverage or even limit the effective performance of such a product.
Disassembly is an exercise that requires the business to ask a question that if we are to recreate the product, what components would be eliminated, improved, modified or added to improve the quality and the overall functionality of the product? Businesses engaged in reverse-engineering do not often just aim to copy and paste, but also to assess how the product can be made differently to bolster its overall effective market performance. The focus must be on the evaluation of how the product can be made differently to create and offer what the current businesses are unable to create and deliver to the existing customers. It must aim to recreate the existing product to deliver values that the customers are yarning for, but cannot be created and delivered using the existing products.
Once such critical analysis is undertaken, it informs the decisions of the engineers during creation and recreation of the product on the components, features and functions that must be removed, added or improved to bolster the overall effective performance of the product. Even for amateur innovators, the process of reverse-engineering may not lead to the creation of the same product. In one way or another, the business may create a similar product which is of either better quality or poor quality.
Copying business can create a poor quality similar product just because it does not have adequate financial resources or the required technology, skills and resources. In that regard, the imitation product will be marketed and sold as meant for the low income groups. The products will be made and sold cheap and marketed as offering values that cannot be created and delivered by the most expensive version of the same product being created by rival firms.
Though creating the same product/cloning after the reverse-engineering exercise can induce legal issues for patent breaches, it can still enable the new innovation business learn about the product and raise enormous financial resources by selling multitudes of the fake versions of the original product prior to embarking on the actual development of their own product concepts. However, for more competent innovation firms possessing superior technologies, skills and knowledge as well as enormous financial resources, the motive of reverse-engineering is usually to assess rivals’ best performing products so as to create and deliver new values that such originally best performing products are not delivering.
In that process, reverse-engineering will be conducted with the motive of discerning the materials that must be reduced to lower costs, components that must be added to improve the effective performance of the product and features that can be added or even removed to improve the quality and the overall attractiveness of the product. The case of reverse-engineering aimed at not just imitating a product, but also creating a better version is reflected in the case of how Polaris used ideas from Harley-Davidson heavy duty motorcycles to create more disruptive new Victory and Indian heavy duty motorcycle brands(Hitt, Ireland & Hoskisson, 2016).
Polaris had been engaged in the manufacturing of Victory Motorbikes, but the overall market performance of victory bikes was not that impressive due to the overall market dominance by Harley-Davidson. As Polaris bought or acquired Indian motorbikes to capitalize on its established brand image and turn around the performance of victory bikes, Polaris sought to increase its investment in R&D (Research and Development) to come up with value offerings that would improve the overall effective market performance of victory bikes in the US.
Aware of the increasing customer dissatisfactions with Harley-Davidson bikes due to high prices and poor performance, Polaris aimed to create substitute US made heavy duty motorbikes. With years and decades spent in the manufacturing of all-terrain vehicles, snowmobiles and personal water-craft, Polaris knew that it had the technological capabilities as well as know-how and resources to create substitute heavy duty bikes that would directly seek to replace Harley-Davidson bikes in the US market (Hitt et al., 2016).
To accomplish that, Polaris’ research executives, personnel and engineers embarked on research and evaluation entailing the visiting of Germany’s BMW plant, Italy’s Ducati and Aprilia Plants as well as England’s Lotus, Cosworth and triumph plants to evaluate how heavy duty motorbikes’ manufacturing processes often unfold. In that process, Polaris’ engineers dismantled Harley-Davidson heavy duty motorbikes in the reverse-engineering initiative. This was aimed to assess the components used as well as the complex resources that would be required to develop such complex heavy duty bikes.
Polaris then evaluated and benchmarked Harley-Davidson as well as Victory and Indian bikes against rival motorbikes like BMW, Kawasaki, Yamaha and Honda to discern the features and attributes that often set Harley-Davidson’s bikes apart from rival motorbikes. It evaluated and benchmarked Polaris’ motorbike ideas against the best rivals’ cruisers like Yamaha Royal Star and Virago, Honda Shadow ACE and Valkyrie, Harley-Davidson Road King, Ducati Monster and BMW R1100R to eliminate wastes. Such initiatives ensured Victory produced within the defined price range to bolster cost competitiveness as well as usage of the required attractive features and design to leverage its brands’ differentiation from those of rivals. After such exercises and the dismantling of the Harley-Davidson bikes, Polaris did not just copy, but sought to change and modify features that would lead to the creation of the bikes that would take Harley-Davidson out of the US market.
To achieve that, Polaris evaluated Harley-Davidson’s engines to develop the best performing Victory V92C engines. Victory V92C bikes were lighter with more torque, storage, better engine performance and lower center of gravity as compared to Harley-Davidson’s heavy duty motorbikes(Hitt et al., 2016). With time, the introduction of more complex victory heavy duty bikes disrupted Harley-Davidson’s market performance. This echoes the argument that through learning and imitation, businesses are able to not only copy and paste business models or new product concepts, but also to develop and build innovation capabilities to create their own brands that can in the long run displaced the copied incumbent from the market.
In addition to working independently, in the modern open innovation system, businesses interested in developing a new product can also strike a strategic alliance and partnership with some of the best performing firms. Businesses can identify the innovators creating the disruptive products of interest and then build relationship and strategic alliance for the business to learn and emulate the best performing firms.
In that process, the business operates through a partnership to learn and understand what it takes to create and deliver a particular product to the market. This improves the acquisition and utilisation of new knowledge in the creation and delivery of the required new products. However, for such strategic alliance and partnership to be successful, the players in the partnership must have benefits that are mutually gained by each other. When Toyota confirmed that Tesla’s electric vehicle ideas would be successful and more disruptive after the successful launch of Tesla Roadster and Model S, Toyota as indicated in the video below had no option but to forge a strategic alliance and partnership with Tesla.
Through strategic alliance, Tesla aimed to learn, replicate and gain from Toyota’s lower cost manufacturing competencies as Toyota engaged in some supported reverse-engineering to learn and understand what it takes to develop and manufacture electric cars. The change from gasoline to electric car manufacturing meant that Toyota engineers and executives had a lot to learn and understand about EV manufacturing processes and technologies. Through such partnership, Toyota got to understand what is required for manufacturing an electric car to gain innovation capabilities to venture on its own in the creation and delivery of its own electric cars like 2024 Toyota BZ4X Review.
Further Readings
Agarwal, A., & Deborah, M.P. (2024). UPS to replace FedEx as U.S. Postal Service’s primary air cargo provider. New York: UPS.
Cain, G. (2020). An excerpt from Samsung Rising: The Inside Story of the South Korean Giant That Set Out to Beat Apple and Conquer Tech. New York: Crown Currency.
Chang, C.W., Mingyan, W., GuXuejiao, W., & LiYuanzhe L. (2021). Research on the Challenge of the New Short Video Platform TikTok on the Traditional Internet Social Media Facebook. September 2021-Conference: 2021 International Conference on Social Sciences, Education and Management.
ECOATM. (2024). History Of iPhone Vs. Samsung. New York: ECOATM.
Glassburn, R. (2022). Steps in the Reverse Engineering Process. Cincinnati: 3D Engineering Solutions.
Hitt, M.A., Ireland, R.D., & Hoskisson, R.E. (2016). Strategic Management: competitiveness and globalisation-concepts and cases. Boston: Cengage Learning.
Kantrowitz, A. (2024).Snapchat was ‘an existential threat’ to Facebook — until an 18-year-old developer convinced Mark Zuckerberg to invest in Instagram Stories.
Newton, C. (2021). How social networks got competitive again. New York: Platformer.
Stanley, L., & Sotolongo, J. (2021). The UPS & FedEx Duopoly – History Repeating Itself for New Competitors (and it’s not Amazon). Texas: FEDEX.
