"creative imitation"

In the early 1930s, IBM built a high-speed calculating machine to do calculations for the astronomers at New York's Columbia University. A few years later it built a machine that was already designed as a computer (...). And by the end of WWII, IBM had built a real computer- the first one, by the way, that had the features of the true computer: a "memory" and the capacity to be "programmed". And yet there are good reasons why the history books pay scant attention to IBM as a computer innovator. For as soon as it had finished its advanced 1945 computer- the first computer to be shown to a lay public in its showroom in midtown New York, where it drew immense crowds- IBM abandoned its own design and switched to the design of its rival, the ENIAC developed at the University of Pennsylvania. The ENIAC was far better suited to business application such as payroll, only its designers did not see this. IBM structured the ENIAC so that it could be manufactured and serviced and could do mundane "number crunching". When IBM's versionof the ENIAC came out in 1953, it at once set the standard for commercial, multipurpose, mainframe computers.

This is the strategy of "creative imitation". It waits until somebody else has established the new, but only "aproximately". Then it goes to work. And within a short time it comes out with what the new really should be to satify the costumer, to do the work customers want and pay for.

The Essential Drucker
Peter F. Drucker
Collins Business (2005)