This Is Why Copying is Everywhere in Asia

Posted on March 07, 2013

Copying in Asia? It’s everywhere. Asia is clone central. Although some have stated that the Asian copying era is coming to a close, I think we’re still waiting on that. In Vietnam, where I am, in 2011, there were 97 Groupon clones. This is repeated throughout Asia. China is globally notorious for cloning stuff, and Southeast Asia is running wild with it.

This brings me to an epiphany I had yesterday at the Lean Mindset workshop with Mary and Tom Poppendieck. Mary said:

Lack of complexity invites other people to copy you. Things that aren’t copied are complex.

No wonder we see so much copying in Asia. Technically, design-wise, and in terms of management of teams, many Asian countries are still catching up to Silicon Valley where much experimentation and failure has lead to a collective base of experience, knowledge, and community.

And this makes sense, right? How long did it take Android to copy iPhone? Apple was arguably the stand-alone market leader from 2007 to 2010 when Android was still not fully marketable. Apple created a completely new market around a touchscreen phone in a way that no one else could do yet. It took years to copy. And in those years, Apple accumulated a treasure trove of wealth.

This principle also applies to things that your startup is copying. If you can copy it, that means it’s not very complex. That means someone else is going to copy it too. That means you’re not adding much value to the market.

Mary gave a great example: a company that built a gambling system across many countries built it so that it understands all relevant gambling laws across all those countries. That’s something terribly hard to replicate. It’s a lot of value. It has multi-million or -billion dollar potential.