Seite - (000274) - in Knowledge and Networks

271 Jacobs (1969) draws on car-maker Henry Ford to illustrate that imitation or, as she calls it, “economic borrowing” (p. 64), can be a promising, often successful path to innovation. Instead of building cars himself, Ford focused on assembling pre- manufactured components. His innovation was not to create a new car but rather to offer to supply each individual component as a replacement part. In a continuing imitation process, he went on to build more and more parts himself until his com- pany finally produced the majority of parts for his famous Model T. Japanese indus- try also applied imitation strategies to adopt external technologies, gradually developing its own competitive technological advantage (Bolton, 1993). The suc- cess of the Swiss watch-making industry is also the result of an intense period of imitation and reverse engineering of French and English watches in the seventeenth century (Maillat, Lecoq, Nemeti, & Pfister, 1995). Moreover, imitation is not only helpful for followers to catch up within an industry, it is an effective mechanism enabling cross-industry innovation (Enkel & Gassmann, 2010). When firms have sufficient absorptive capacity, they may detect and transfer to their own industry good practices and solutions from related and even unrelated industries. It is this unforeseeable potential for learning by imitation that makes the diversity of a city so crucial for long-term innovativeness (Jacobs, 1969). The imitation process comprises three key mechanisms (Malmberg & Maskell, 2002): variation, observation, and imitation. It starts with variation stemming from parallel experimentation and the distributed search for innovations: “the tendency to variation is a chief cause of progress” (Marshall, 1890, p. 355). A firm’s ability to compete derives from the heterogeneous nature of the solutions that firms create based on different competencies, experiences, strategies, and resources. To attain this competitiveness, firms need to create new solutions and new combinations of existing solutions: “Little progress would be made in a world of clones” (Lundvall & Maskell, 2000, p. 364). “The blind-variation-and-selective-retention model unequivocally implies that, ceteris pari- bus, the greater the heterogeneity and volume of trials the greater the chance of a productive innovation” (Campbell, 1960, p. 395). If there is great variety in the available practices, organizations have the opportu- nity to identify suitable solutions by using a process of attentive searches and obser- vations, and in the final stage they can transfer this knowledge to their own company by imitating them. Unlike the generation of knowledge in partnerships, imitation refers to the uni- lateral transfer of existing solutions from one company to another. Imitation offers savings when established practices are transferred. Imitation cuts the costs of typi- cal trial-and-error used in the research process (Jacobs, 1969). We distinguish between two fundamental situations for imitation (Glückler, 2013a). With friendly imitation, there is a cooperative transfer of solutions, with the owners of the solu- tions voluntarily agreeing to transfer them or even actively transferring them out- right. With unfriendly imitation, the owners of the solutions try to prevent their imitation or disapprove of any secret imitation. In this section we investigate the circumstances under which imitation processes in a network are viewed as either 13 Connectivity in Contiguity