In the age of AI, a product, service or idea can be copied quickly and cheaply. Today, the true value of a business lies in the experience, the story and the ecosystem.
A few years ago, innovation was measured by the ability of a company to invent “before the others”; to design a product or service that is sufficiently differentiating to maintain a sustainable competitive advantage. Today, a new reality is shaking up this paradigm.
We live in the era of widespread copyability.
An era where a product, a service, an idea, thousands of lines of code, can be duplicated quickly and at lower cost, thanks to digital technologies and the globalization of knowledge. Artificial intelligence, far from slowing down this phenomenon, accelerates it: it automates reproduction and makes it accessible to a growing number of actors.
The question is therefore no longer: “Will we be copied?” » but: “In how long?” » and above all: “What makes us irreplaceable? »
If everything can be copied, the true wealth, the rarity, no longer resides only in the innovative object. It moves towards what remains difficult to imitate: the experience, the story and the ecosystem.
Experience is the ability to provide the customer with a smooth, engaging and memorable journey that creates a lasting relationship. The story is the deep reason for being, the why that inspires and gives meaning. When a company is the first to embody this narrative, it leaves a unique mark on its market. The ecosystem, finally, is this ability to generate interactions with its customers, to bring together communities and to establish strategic partnerships which create value beyond the product or service, sustainably consolidating the position of the company.
One might believe that technological sophistication and intellectual property are enough to protect an innovation. They constitute real obstacles, but insufficient barriers. The complexity slows down without hindering. It can even become a strategic trap, hindering the agility of the company. The law provides a protective framework. However, fragmented on a global scale, it often proves slow, costly, and unevenly applied.
Open Source is a real engine of innovation. Its massive adoption by businesses today gives it a central role in the digital economy. Open source also gives a paradoxical feeling since it allows global communities to co-build while facilitating the immediate appropriation and replication on a large scale of what has been designed.
In this context, the real barrier becomes speed and agility: get out quickly, convince quickly, collect quickly. And above all, to constantly reinvent ourselves in a logic of “living” innovation; which renews itself, in connection with its environment, resilient and embodied.
This shift profoundly modifies the nature of the “core asset” of an innovative company. Technology remains important, of course, but it is no longer enough. It is now the strength of the brand, the values, the relationship with customers and partners, and the corporate culture which constitute the real defensive assets. In short, it is the human, cultural and symbolic dimensions that make a proposition unique, difficult to replicate, and confer a lasting advantage.
While innovation quickly loses its exclusive character and tends towards convenience, originality thus ceases to be fixed in an isolated invention and becomes embodied in a dynamic process.
Copiability does not only concern companies, it is also the strategic tool, the Trojan Horse in the economic and cultural war between States. It accelerates the diffusion not only of technologies, but also of worldviews and norms.
Thus, copyability goes beyond the simple issue of competitiveness for companies: it becomes an instrument of soft power and a lever of geopolitical rivalry between States.
The example of DeepSeek, the open source Chinese conversational agent, illustrates this dynamic well. This software is the result of a rapid and inexpensive reproduction of an existing innovation – while integrating its own advances. As highlighted in an article in the magazine Le Grand Continent on the rise of conflict between the United States and China, it induces not only the massive diffusion of Chinese technology, but also that of the values which underlie it (openness, frugality, technological autonomy, ideological alignment), entering into direct competition with those of the American adversary.
In a world saturated with tools capable of replicating everything, immediately, competitive advantage no longer relies only on invention, but also on the ability to remain irreplaceable.
