Copycat: successful innovation through business model imitation

I strongly believe that entrepreneurship is one of the most effective keys to unlock the potential of the human being. The concept is strictly associated to the idea of bringing innovation into a certain environment; however, nowadays, the tendency is to acknowledge innovation only as introduction of new products/services and technological improvements into a specific market or industry. At the contrary, innovation can be disclose at different level: business model, process, production, operations management or simply strategy planning. In this paper, we are going to analyze and highlight one of those ignored or vaguely treated, kind of innovation: the copycat business strategies. The paradox of limited literature about such an interesting topic is direct consequence of any ethical and cultural constrains that tend to influence and limit the judgement of both readers and academics. The idea of this academic paper is to provide a fair analysis and studio for this particular scenario, trying to understand how to capture the hidden innovation behind any copycat success, pursuing this objective by: - Studying of existing literature in the field; - Building up an empirical model able to highlight the key driven variables to evaluate any copycat business strategy; - Proving the model using the business case research analysis as leading methodology. The final output is not only the explanatory empirical model and related variables, but also a wide overview about the current scientific literature about the topic, underling the gaps and proposing insight for further researches.