Recently, Pan Jiutang, a partner of Xiaomi’s Industrial Investment Department, once again publicly stated that imitation is the basis for innovation, but no company can succeed by relying solely on imitation. Previously, Pan Jiutang publicly stated that the last wave of domestic car companies doing pure electric products mostly compared Tesla, but they were not very successful. After Xiaomi SU7/YU7 received great praise from professionals (many top domestic and foreign car companies have dismantled it) and welcomed by consumers, many peers hastily changed their product roadmaps and even their names in the past 25 years, which is normal business behavior.
In Pan Jiutang's view, if Xiaomi expands its range in the future, it will definitely learn from its ideals, but it will never learn from them without acknowledging them or even secretly doing so.
This also triggered heated discussions among netizens. Pan Jiutang was very calm about corporate imitation.
"Each of us is constantly imitating/learning from others from birth to death. Benchmarking is also the most common business strategy. Not only Chinese companies, but also overseas giants such as Apple (Xerox/Braun), Microsoft, and Google are also buying and copying in large quantities." The executive said.
In addition, Pan Jiutang also reiterated that imitation is the basis of innovation. There is no successful company that does not imitate a lot of others (you can refute me with counterexamples in the comment area), and no company can achieve success by relying solely on imitation.
Industrial progress and social development are essentially a group of smart people/enterprises imitating/inspiring each other while micro-innovating, pushing each other and making progress. Imitation/learning/benchmarking are all normal and there is no need to discredit them.
