Innovation ?

I am certainly not an expert in innovation or startegy and all that good stuff, but one observation I have made over the last few years of following a bunch of american and indian firms is that .... Innovation is not necessarily about creating new things and generating new ideas, but more about using some existing ideas in various contexts and creating things which appear to be new as far as the target audience is concerned.

Sony Entertainment India didn't take too long to figure out that the Indian counter part of American Idol will definitely be extremely sucessful in India. They quickly signed some agreements with the creaters of American Idol, and stole the idea into Indian homes. Today , Indian Idol is second only to Kaun Banega Crorepathi (which has its roots in one more american TV show) in TRP ratings.

Jim Cramer called rediff.com the Indian Google. Rediff is trying to do exactly that and they are doing pretty well. They have the "rediff sponsored links" , the "rediff news hound" , all aping various concepts google came up with.

Google themselves have created finance.google.com which makes some minor but effective modifications to finance.yahoo.com. Google, now synonymous with internet search, actually came into the search engine business after yahoo and maybe even msn did , but just did it better.

We can, quite easily, pick umpteen other cases of "innovative ideas" which are actually just a modified version of what someone else has already done. The key, obviously is to make sure that the customer group that you are targeting finds it as innovative as you do. With the world economy doing quite well recently, we might actually see a lot more cash-rich companies comming out with some interesting products based on already existing products. It might not be long before IBM "innovates" with a next-generation mp3 player thats better than ipod or Taj Indian hotels comes up with a "Idly-Vada-Tikka" chain that competes with Mcdonalds.