Tess Pape figured out the correspondence problem on her own. But what if she had been taught how to imitate? Imitating well is a skill, one that Oded Shenkar believes should be deliberately cultivated. Shenkar, a professor of management and human resources at Ohio State University, studies how companies use imitation to gain a strategic edge in the marketplace. He maintains that we are living in a golden “age of imitation,” in which access to information about how other people are addressing problems similar to our own has made it more feasible than ever to copy effective solutions. Shenkar
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