After the ancient silk merchants went through the Western regions trade route, the entire caravan of Chang 'an City set out in their footprints.
After Venetian merchants mastered the secret recipe for glassmaking in the 15th century, glassworks throughout Europe began to fire vessels with the same recipe.
Today, the number of orders for a platform broadcast room increased sharply in a short period of time, and three days later, the screen was full of similar sets of goods.
The rules of the game in the business world will never change: the first person to understand the underlying code of the copy will be able to overtake at the corner of Fortune Raceway.
First, replication is the survival wisdom engraved in the gene
Three-year-olds see their parents using chopsticks and grab two sticks in awkward imitation.
When primitive tribes in the Amazon jungle saw foreigners using bows and arrows, they learned to update their hunting tools.
This is not plagiarism, but an evolutionary instinct written into human DNA.
90% of innovation is a new combination of old elements.
Second, the correct way to open the copy
Luckin Coffee 2017 is a classic case in point. Instead of developing behind closed doors like traditional companies, they took Starbucks's menu and compared it one by one:
Is Americano too bitter? Add two sets of sweetness recipes.
Lattes too expensive? Use the takeaway instead of in-room food.
When everyone laughs at them as "fake Starbucks", they have used this copy and improvement strategy to open thousands of stores in three years.
Why Most people fail to copy:
The more ignorant people are, the more they blindly change the core elements.
It's like a novice chef who follows a Michelin recipe, always thinking he can "improve" it better, but it always backfires.
Before you have a certain achievement, first copy one by one. Wait until you've mastered the core and then think about innovating on your own.
Steve Jobs once said, "Good artists copy, great artists steal." The "theft" here is the creative reconstruction after understanding the underlying logic.
3. Replication boundaries and breakthroughs
Of course, copying requires you to carry it completely mindlessly.
Real smart people should be like Zhang Yiming: copy the core of others' play, but recommend the algorithm to the extreme, and build a moat with localized content ecology.
As Huang Zheng, founder of Pinduoduo, said: We are just moving the village market of 20 years ago online.
Coincidentally, Taobao, Alipay, Baidu are the first imitation and then beyond.
To avoid the replication trap, remember the three iron rules: don't touch the patent red line, preserve traces of improvement, and build barriers to difference.
A very interesting case:
After a boss copied the recipe of an Internet red pickled cabbage fish, he specially added regional characteristics of Perilla seasoning. Now his foundry ships tens of thousands of packets a day, and the original pickled fish merchants are coming to buy his secret sauce.
The next time you see someone making money, don't be jealous or sarcastic, calm down and dismantle the copy path - because all the wealth codes have been repeated thousands of times in history.
