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That seems to go counter to the widely held idea of "innovate or die". If your company just wants to clone the market leader, what value are you to the customer? Management often wants "safe" so no fingers can be pointed at them. I consider that a failure in leadership.

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Really depends on whether its worth the effort to innovate on that thing?

Is your company's core product a billing system? Then it pays to innovate on billing systems and differentiate from competitors.

Do you just need a billing system so you can collect money and move on with innovating where it actually matters? then buy and don't make.

wasting time on doing novel things that don't differentiate your business only puts you behind your competitors.

There are different types of companies, and even within companies there are different levels of innovation needed depending on context. Take a current darling like Anthropic. Even though their main product is innovative, a lot of the nuts and bolts are source code adjacent tooling that is as old as the hills.

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