Thrilled to share that our new article “When to Innovate and When to Imitate” has been published in Harvard Business Review! Working with my wonderful co-authors Maria Roche and Rebecca Karp has been an absolute pleasure. This collaboration was one of the highlights of my sabbatical at Harvard Business School last semester.
What struck us most is how understudied imitation remains in the business literature. While innovation gets the spotlight, imitation often sits quietly in the footnotes of learning research. Yet in practice, imitation is likely more pervasive than either pure learning or innovation—and deserves serious strategic consideration.
Maria and Rebecca teach an exceptional MBA elective called “Innovating at Scale”, and I was excited to contribute insights from my previous research to complement their course:
- On imitation strategies (with Nicolaj Siggelkow)
- On competitive positioning (with Ron Adner and Peter Zemsky)
- On organizational search (with Dan Levinthal)
This is exactly the kind of theory-meets-practice work that helps keep strategy education fresh and relevant: taking emerging insights from across different streams of strategy research and weaving them together for the classroom.
Would love to hear your thoughts, how do you see the balance between innovation and imitation in your own work?
Read the article: “When to Innovate and When to Imitate”
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