While walking downtown last weekend, we saw a woman wearing an intriguing shirt:
It’s an interesting and confusing combination of words. But it applies very well to some daily encounters here. Like this pile of large rocks we saw in a park last week:
Around the corner, we saw that a tree had fallen across the rocks, revealing the truth underneath:
A few of my students brought some copycat items to class last month. A real and a fake Uno game:
real and fake Oreos (can you identify the real ones?):
and a copycat Spalding basketball from our nearby department store:
Real fakes! We have some authentic ones here…
Real Fake
November 8th, 2016 · 4 Comments · Uncategorized
Tags:
The Oreo package on the left looks more like the shape of the packages here, so that’s my guess.
Good try! (guess again…)
There’s probably an interesting lesson here somewhere on the value (or lack thereof) of IP restrictions. The question is do you start to see faster and faster innovation in a world where there is less of that? Or less? Or wasted expense on marketing changes / ways of “proving” authenticity?
Since the planning horizon in this culture is much shorter, it seems to me that they are less likely to worry about R&D investment payback. While this could lead to faster innovation as each company builds on “the republic of science” (Polanyi), it clearly leads to many more business failures. It will be interesting to see if “western” philosophies of long-term planning and IP protection develop over the next decade.