Since you mentioned product innovations that can be copied id also like you to have a read of my article on evolutionary design (you can just type it in search) on WATBlog im sure ul get easily linked. Im sure you will enjoy it.

Another addition to what you said – its often observed that the No. 1 player is never really the most ‘innovative’ – they merely capitalize upon ideas quickly – and quickly enough so that they are perceived as the ‘innovator’. Consider Totyota with hybrid cars – there are many such examples.

I dont think so – while you may be correct with respect to innovations that reach you as a consumer as a result of favourable word of mouth, its not an obvious line by any means with respect to all innovations!

Consider the number of products thats may have been ‘innovated’ upon but are scrapped before production. Consider the failed innovations that do get produced but are never accepted by the consumer.

Do you agree?

If the product can be easily imitated by having a workaround on the patent etc, then your competitor can always come out with a similar product. In that case things will depend on how easy or difficult it is to market the innovation. If your competitor has complementary assets like service network, sales network, customer loyalty etc its better you sell your innovation to your competitor. Otherwise your competitor can find out a workaround of your innovation and come to market alone.

On the other hand if you competitor isn’t so powerful or even if powerful doesn’t have complementary assets you can think of branding early to have advantage over your competitor. For e.g take case of Airtel. When it launched operations in India, there were powerful competitor like BPL, Essar-Hutch, Tatas etc but all of them lacked the complementary assets to make mobile services successful and all of them have to start from scratch. In that case Airtel was on even ground with others and therefore could afford to go alone with entire gamut of marketing.

Wont all innovations fall into that category?