Playing catch-up

Recently I've been discussing strategy with a couple of colleagues, and as stimulating as it is to discuss things with smart people as frustrating it can become later on when trying to make sense of the discussions and figuring out what is the right direction going forward...

One of the topics that stuck with me was a few discussions revolving around "catching up". What does it mean to catch up in a strategic sense? When is it possible and when does it make sense?

Copying
One way of interpreting catching up is to be able to do what someone else is already doing. If everyone else is using a technology you are not using it can of course be a big disadvantage not to have this technology implemented, makes sense? Every body else is doing it, so... Not so fast! There are some issues with this:

• If you implement yesterdays big thing today, and finish that work tomorrow, you will still be behind the leaders who started yesterday what is the next thing to work on. You might be a little bit less behind at best, but that's not really going to solve your disadvantage.
• If you are behind on something you are likely to slow at adopting new things, if it's not because you are starting to late (as per above) it might be because you are adopting to slowly. Copying others will not solve this problem, you will need to find the reason why you are too slow and solve that problem.

Dead ends

In some cases copying works, if the capability you are copying gives an ability without options to progress further it might make sense to copy it to put you at the same level as the competition. If you are an innovator you need to be careful not to waste significant energy on dead ends because it will most likely be much easier and cheaper to imitate your innovation and the be on par with you but at much lower cost.

This is why some nations have developed nuclear weapons. If you want to be a military superpower it makes sense to have nuclear capabilities, not because it is a weapon you can practically use or use to build further capabilities on. Even if you get that capability later than the others that puts you on par because it is threatening enough to be able to destroy the planet one time, you don't need to threaten to destroy it several times over or faster than someone else.

Imitation before innovation

A common strategy is to imitate before trying to innovate. Even though you lose pace duplicating effort, if the value is high enough it might provide a necessary stepping stone, after all it's hard to grasp the effort needed for progress if you haven't reached mastery of the current best practice.

When your efforts in imitating what the competition is doing allows you to innovate in multiple directions then it makes sense as it will give you the option to do your own innovation once you have caught up. It makes sense though to consider a fairly early point in time when to digress from what others are doing, otherwise you'll just be in perpetual imitation and just thinking or talking about innovation.

This strategy has been executed successfully, Japanese camera manufacturers come to mind, and is based on the basic ability to be able to improve technology and quality faster than the competition. If you have that extremely powerful ability you can catch up even when being far behind.

Leapfrogging
If you are behind and not able to outperform your competition in development or research you may simply try to leapfrog the competition. This is typically possibly to do either by taking a more direct route to your desired end goal, if your competition has spent effort on doing A, then B, then C even if it was not possible at the time to understand how to get to C without passing B with the benefit of hindsight it might be feasible (or even easy) to go direct for C or at least do B and C in one go and at least save considerable efforts in the process.

A very direct strategy when trying to leapfrog is to look at which new areas you can play where your competition has little or no advantage from being ahead of you. Your competition might even be at a disadvantage from previous heavy investments that are no longer needed or valuable.

As development progress many things get commoditized or standardized, or even become a public good. An example of this was how Google could build a well liked email service (Gmail) without doing much research and development since the basic information and standards where all public standards. Gmail could leapfrog existing services by creating something were similar to what was available and add a small amount of custom improvements to their own service.

Dangers
A classic danger when thinking about catch-up is that it might be the wrong thing to do in the first place, there is a risk that you will simply be viewed as one of the lackluster companies trying to copy the innovators. The mindset of catching up moves the focus from what works for you and your strengths to what works for others and beating competitors at their game is bound to be difficult.

An example of this weakness is enterprise sales people who state that buying X is best in class or "industry standard" (hinting that you need to catch up) while not having the slightest clue if you are in need of such a solution or if it can solve the challenges and problems you have. There is a risk with this way of thinking to implement a tool that doesn't give you any competitive advantage.