Copy That In business, imitation is more than a form of flattery.

Being a copycat has always been anchored by a sense of derision.But now Randall Rothenberg claims that imitating an idea is notonly efficient--it can be effective. The senior director ofintellectual capital at global strategy and technology consultingfirm Booz Allen Hamilton and contributor to The Big Moo: StopTrying to Be Perfect and Start Being Remarkable explains howimitation is becoming a major path to business success.

BIZ Experiences: You say imitation across industriesis a more effective and profitable strategy than the promotion ofinnovation and creativity. How so?

Randall Rothenberg: Big breakthrough ideas, ifsuccessful, can create new markets. But there's ample evidencethat some of the biggest businesses are built by taking existingideas and applying them in a new context. Research by Booz AllenHamilton looked at data about value creation across industries. Itfound that only four distinct ideas had been responsible for anoverwhelming majority of value creation in the U.S. over a 30-yearperiod: power retailing, where big-box stores can drive costs andconsumer prices down (Home Depot); mega-branding, which is thedevelopment of a powerful umbrella brand (Disney);focus/simplify/standardize, where process simplification allows forready multiplication and growth by relentlessly lowering costs(McDonald's); and value-chain bypass, where middlemen areeliminated, thus delivering lower prices or higher revenue(Amazon.com).

Don't look for the business that's never been tried,because you can break your brain trying to find that, and youwon't have any concept of the risk or opportunities. Instead,take a look at something that has worked, and see if it can beapplied in your context.

BIZ Experiences: How should BIZ Experiencess beginlooking for these great ideas?

Rothenberg: I'm a believer in small-scaleexperi-mentation-it's the low-cost, low-stress, high-joyR&D effort. The web and the tools to create and manage websites[give you] some of the greatest R&D opportunities in thehistory of commerce. [For example, a retailer] can use the existinginfrastructure of eBay [to test products].

The largest company on earth, General Electric Co., is a heavilystrategic company, and as large as it is, it prizes imagination,innovation and inventiveness. One of the rules they learn at GE isyou can really experiment with anything, as long as it'sstrategically aligned, and you can do it on your existingincremental budget.