Copy Everything Intelligently - Story of Rocket Internet

 

Being Innovative: Copy Everything & Give Credit

Another lesson to learn about innovation is to not start everything from scratch but to replicate whatever is available in the market. A good example of this is Rocket Internet. You must be wondering what I am talking about but let me explain.

Rocket Internet is one company that is revolutionizing the world. It is making a German company that buys startups or create its own startups in countries with small or mid-sized market.

Why is rocket internet thriving? Because it focuses on replication. The company replicates all ideas of the first world and introduces them to the third world. Its investments include Daraz, Carmudi, Foodpanda, Delivery hero to name a few.

Rocket Internet has been labelled by many as a copycat or a company that thrives off other businesses’ success. But does calling it a copycat hurt its bottomline? Nope! In fact, it has grown faster than many other businesses. What Rocket Internet does is that it acquires small brands in one niche and then makes them successful by changing the way they work and then sells them to other investors.

Here is how it does that. It searches for successful startups. It searched that Booking.com is successful in its model and brought Jovago as an alternative to Pakistan and Jumia to Kenya and South Africa. Similarly, it bought Delivery Hero – parent company of Foodpanda and bought Eat Oye, a local competitor of Food panda and merged the two. Today, Foodpanda is successful in Pakistan and almost every household in the country knows about it.

What one needs to understand about Rocket Internet is that it is not transforming the business model but making certain iterations that makes it better than the earlier version. It has a standard that it follows across all its products to improve their working, enhance their marketing, and bring them to market faster. The time from production to launch is cut short to just one month in most products by Rocket Internet. It then promotes them across all channels and tests their feasibility. Since the products are internet based, they get tested within days.

One thing to note about Rocket Internet is that it only replicates business models that are already successful in the market and never goes for those that are not yet successful.

In essence, innovation is to repeat success and expand on it.

Writing on Self Reflection by Hasan Shahid