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  3. Every year Les Wexner, the owner of Victoria’s Secret, a lingerie(女士内衣)retailer, takes a month off to travel the world looking f

Every year Les Wexner, the owner of Victoria’s Secret, a lingerie(女士内衣)retailer, takes a month off to travel the world looking f

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问题     Every year Les Wexner, the owner of Victoria’s Secret, a lingerie(女士内衣)retailer, takes a month off to travel the world looking for other companies’ ideas to adopt. Mr. Wexner’s philosophy is that business should celebrate imitation.
    That is almost a heresy. Businesses are told to innovate or die. Imitators are cast as the bad guys. But in the real world, companies copy and succeed. The iPod was not the first digital-music player; nor was the iPhone the first smartphone or the iPad the first tablet. Apple imitated others’ products but made them far more appealing.
    The pace and intensity of legal imitation has quickened in recent years, argues Oded Shenkar, a management professor at Ohio State University, in a provocative book, " Copycats: How Smart Companies Use Imitation to Gain a Strategic Edge".
    History shows that imitators often end up winners. Who now remembers Chux, the first disposable nappies, whose thunder was stolen by Pampers? Ray Kroc, who built McDonald’s, copied White Castle, inventor of the fast-food burger joint. Even Playboy magazine was just an imitator, noted Ted Levitt, one of the earliest management gurus to acknowledge the role of imitation. Copying is not only far commoner than innovation in business, wrote Levitt in the 1960s, but a surer route to growth and profits. According to "Copycats", studies show that imitators do at least as well and often better from any new product than innovators do. Followers have lower research-and-development costs, and less risk of failure because the product has already been market-tested. A study by Peter Golder and Gerard Tellis, "Pioneer Advantage; Marketing Logic or Marketing Legend" , found that innovators captured only 7% of the market for their product over time.
    Firms seldom admit to being copycats. But some businesspeople are willing to talk about the limitations of innovation. Kevin Rollins, a former chief executive of Dell, a computer-maker, asked, " If innovation is such a competitive weapon, why doesn’t it translate into profitability?" But most remain obsessed with their own inventions. Copying is taboo. Praise and promotion do not go to employees who borrow from other firms.
    As a result, firms pay insufficient attention to the art of copying. Levitt examined a group of companies whose sales depended on regularly launching new products. None of them, he found, had either a formal or informal policy on how to respond to other firms’ innovations. So they were often far too slow to imitate rivals’ successes, and missed out on profits. Not much has changed since Levitt’s day. Though copying is fairly common, lots of companies fail to do it effectively. American firms in particular are too obsessed with innovation, argues Mr. Shenkar. By contrast, Asian companies—such as Panasonic, whose former parent, Matsushita, was nicknamed maneshita denki, "electronics that have been copied"—have excelled at legal imitation.
    Excessive copying, of course, could be bad for society as a whole. Joseph Schumpeter worried that if innovators could not get enough reward from new products because imitators were taking so much of the profit, they would spend less on developing them. But that is not the immediate concern of corporations. Copying is here to stay; businesses may as well get good at it.

选项
答案B
解析 奥代德·申卡尔(Oded Shenkar)也是文中多次出现的一位学者。题干中问题提到的美国和亚洲国家的不同点在文章第六段有谈及。申卡尔说，美国公司往往过于关注创新(而不重视模仿)，而亚洲公司在模仿方面做得很好(excel at legal imitation)。因此，本题对应的选项应该是[B]are actively involvedin legal imitation，而不是[A]are too obsessed with innovation。
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