SubscribeThe Myth of the German Copycat Attitude
Published by cornelius on Thursday, October 23rd, 2008 in Entrepreneurship.Tags: copycat, idea dissemination, tagcrumbs
Yet another post about the copycat attitude of Germans, this time by VentureBeat. So why not state some subjective opinions about this frequently mentioned claim…
This kind of annoys me because as an interested person in the Internet startup scene you always read that Germans are just doing copycat startups, meaning copying existing ideas from other countries and introducing it (only) to the German market, with the hope of pioneer gains. Also referred to it as the Second But Elsewhere strategy, which puts a focus on the underlying strategy instead of just saying yet another boring startup. Seems like everyone is hoping to find spontaneously a killer innovation in a startup but innovations are not a big bang process and also have to evolve and a wide distribution is what makes something to be innovative and useful.
The annoying point is, that this fact is always repeated by the media, founders or investors (customers don’t care if they get value delivered), so it is kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. What is the problem with that? First, as long as you create profitable companies and customers love you application, nothing is wrong. Second, the term copying is pretty broad, identical copies, copies of features, ideas or concepts? The car was invented in Germany and I can see a lot of copycats (with close to identical products)… No one cares. If you go to a shopping mall you see various products of different manufacturers and this is how business works, there is a market with competition and you can compete over the price, the quality or the time to deliver. A normal process of idea and product dissemination with the goal to provide the best customer value, because the customer can select out of a variety of products the one that fits best. It is a consumer market where the consumers decide what the company should provide and not vice versa. There is a need for really similar applications that have something special for specific niches or geographic regions.
Ok, now we have a fast-paced Internet economy with less protectable intellectual property where it is even easier to go with a second but elsewhere strategy, so why complain? That’s just the case and the market is really big with a distribution channel like the Web. But I admit, I wish there would be more innovative and creative Internet startups in Germany with an international focus. At the point two companies compete on the same market it does not matter anymore who copied whom. There have to be more good examples of how it can be done but continuously speaking about copycats is just annoying.
To conclude, stop the copycat posts and give a more detailed analysis of Internet startups and their potential markets if you care but don’t create a general hypothesis of Germany’s copycat attitude over all industries, just tedious to read! You can call every company a copycat if you want, Google did not invent online search, YouTube not online video, Facebook/MySpace not social networking but still they did provide something new and attractive to customers.
By the way, Germany is still export champion world wide and the number of patent application in relative and absolute terms is pretty impressive. Nothing to worry about the copycat attitude or the missing technology transfer. Still, the Germans are the calm hard-working and smart persons with there strengths in the non consumer-oriented industries. Or does anyone has one of the fabulous Heidelberg Druck printing machines in their office?
The Chinese culture and economy is much more focused on developing close to identical copies but no one cares in the Internet economy because they are working behind walled gardens in their own market. If they get the chance to become more international no one will speak about the German Internet copycat attitude anymore…
P. S.
As the co-founder of Tagcrumbs I have to say it is born out of an idea where we took different concepts like user generated content, tagging, folksonomy, mapping in the GeoWeb, social media trends to create a product that we and hopefully customers like. Of course there are competitors with similar ideas, otherwise there would be no market. But Tagcrumbs distinguishes itself in many ways, not just some unimportant additional features.
The tone of this post is not as bad as it sounds, it is caused by the bad weather here in Galway, Ireland. Keep on the reporting about German startups. 
The ‘Never Hide’ picture was taken by Svadilfari, thanks.
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