Citation: Csaszar, F. A. and Siggelkow, N. (2010). How much to copy? Determinants of effective imitation breadth. Organization Science 21(3) 661–676. doi:10.1287/orsc.1090.0477
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Paper highlights
Imitation is not a yes-or-no choice. A firm can copy a few practices or an entire system, learn from a close rival or a firm in a different setting, and judge success over a short or long horizon. This paper asks how those choices determine whether imitation helps.
The central result is that copying more is not always better. When a firm’s practices are tightly interdependent, the value of imitation breadth depends strongly on context similarity and time horizon. Broad imitation can help reproduce a successful configuration, but partial imitation can also break the fit among practices. Copying a dissimilar firm is especially hazardous in the short run.
How the model works
The model represents a firm as a configuration of interdependent practices on a performance landscape. Firms improve through local search and occasionally imitate practices used by better-performing firms. Simulations vary three conditions: how many practices are copied, how strongly the practices interact, and how similar the two firms’ contexts are.
Main takeaways
- Imitation serves two distinct purposes: reproducing another firm’s configuration and dislodging the imitator from its current position so that it explores elsewhere.
- With strong interdependence, the best imitation breadth can be very different for short and long horizons.
- Copying from a dissimilar context can lower performance. Small doses may still help over long horizons by prompting search, even when the copied practice itself does not fit.
Why it matters
- Imitation has three distinct design choices: how much to copy, whom to copy, and how long to wait before judging the result.
- Copying a coherent system from a similar firm can preserve complementarities. A partial copy from a distant firm may instead be valuable as a jump into unfamiliar territory.
- Imitation can therefore support exploration as well as replication.
How to use this paper
Cite this for
- A model of imitation breadth in which firms copy practices from a high-performing firm rather than merely choose whether to imitate.
- Evidence that interdependence, context similarity, and time horizon jointly shape the payoff from imitating more practices.
- The distinction between imitation as faithful replication and imitation as a way to dislodge a firm into new search.
Useful for teaching
- Why benchmarking a high performer can still fail when practices are complementary and contexts differ.
- How short-run and long-run evaluation can favor different imitation breadths.
- How NK-style models connect practice interdependence to strategic transfer.
Careful claim
When firms imitate a high performer in the model, broader copying helps mainly under favorable similarity and time-horizon conditions; partial or dissimilar copying can break complementarities or serve as a search shock.
Abstract
It is a common and frequently implicit assumption in the literature on knowledge transfer and organizational learning that imitating practices from high-performing firms has a positive impact on the imitating firm. While a large body of research has identified obstacles to successful imitation, not much is known about what breadth of imitation is most effective. In this paper, we use a simulation model to explore how interdependence among practices, context- and firm-similarity, and time horizon interact in non-trivial ways to determine the payoffs that arise from different breadths of imitation.
The results of the model allow us to qualify and refine predictions of the extant literature on imitation. In particular, the results shed light on the conditions under which increases in imitation breadth, and hence investments that facilitate the faithful copying of more practices, are valuable. In addition, the results of the model highlight that imitation can serve two different functions—mimicking high performers, and generating search by dislodging a firm from its current set of practices—each one requiring different organizational routines for its successful implementation.
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Last updated 2026-06-21