The Imitation Game: Who wants to be the next billionaire?

You want to be an entrepreneur? An innovator, perhaps? Or both.

Not much has been written about the common ties that bind the entrepreneurs and innovators who run the global information technology empire. Are they any different from people such as John Rockefeller who also ran a large oil and railroad empire or just ordinary folks like you and me? I am sure you would like to know.

Welcome to the imitation game being played across the globe. Not the one where, during World War II, English mathematicians including Alan Turing managed to break the German communication code by replicating the machine used by the Nazis. Dubbed the Enigma machine, copies of the machine were sold by the perfidious British to unsuspecting African countries wishing to protect their official correspondence by describing it as an unbreakable cryptographic system. This deception was kept up until the early 1960s.

It has been said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. In the 1950s and 60s, Japan was known for producing shoddy imitations of US products such as cars and household electronics. The country soon thereafter became a world leader in building excellent cars and electronics. Fifty years on, the Chinese have been imitating Japan and the US. Soon, they will surpass both, especially in AI and supercomputers.

India has either purchased or imitated, rather badly, the products of science and technology emanating from elsewhere, typically the US, UK or Germany. In the IT field, unlike China, not a single piece of original software – be it in the realm of social media, search engines or browsers – worthy of adoption at the national or international level has ever been written in India. As for basic research in the sciences, nothing to speak of. Labelling mediocre or yet-to-be-established institutes as institutions of pre-eminence is absurd. Naming your child Einstein doesn’t make him or her so. The IITs have always been stillborn.

Years ago, when the Chinese were about to take possession of a Boeing meant to be used by their leader, they discovered it was full of bugs. The listening kind. It is quite unfair that the US should single out Huawei for sanctions based on the perception that the company could be spying on US citizens by sending their data to China. Couldn’t Cisco be doing the same thing? Well, based on the Cambridge Analytica scandal, you do know what Facebook did with your data.

John Rockefeller, America’s first billionaire and founder of Standard Oil Company, was a ruthless businessman who engaged in industrial espionage and extremely anti-competitive tactics such as buying up railroads and preventing them from transporting oil for other oil companies. He also colluded with General Motors to shut down cheap mass transit systems such as streetcars/trams, resulting in people having to buy cars. Microsoft, Apple, Amazon and Google have all been guilty of the same type of conduct – except that it happens to be in the IT industry.

Don’t have any original ideas but still want to innovate? No problem, you can always borrow someone else’s idea and make money. A whole lot. And while you are busy making money, maybe you can read up on two icons of the IT world – Bill Gates and Steve Jobs – and how Windows icons came into being.

Suppose you have come up with an innovative idea with two of your college buddies. Well, you can start a company with just one of them and ignore the other. When the company gets to be enormously successful, you can always pay off the college buddy you ignored when you get sued. While your lawyer is working out the settlement details, you can read about Mark Zuckerberg and his college mates at Harvard.

It seems like the necessary prerequisites for becoming a successful entrepreneur and innovator are attendance at an elite institution (for example, Bill Gates went to Harvard but did not graduate), a lack of ethics, and that you come from the upper echelons of society. And atone for ethical lapses by becoming a philanthropist. The ensuing tax write-off is incidental, of course.

Good luck.