Effects of strategic customer behavior on imitative innovation supply chain performance

Compare to original innovation, imitative innovation has been efficient product introduction strategy for entrant firm because of higher success, more customer requirement satisfied and lower investment. Entrant firm introduces quality improvement product through imitating and improving incumbent firm´s product, that is, original product. Quality improvement products induce customers to strategic waiting to obtaining more consumer´s surplus by inter-temporal rationally choose purchase timing and product type, in which in turn enhance value of imitative innovation. We study entrant firm choose common marketing channels. In this channel, entrant firm and incumbent firm constitute supplier competition supply chain. Our conclusions show that when quality price ratio of quality improvement product is higher than original product, under low production cost cases, all strategic customers transfer to buy quality improvement product, imitative innovation supply chain expected profits significantly higher than original supply chain profits; Under high production cost cases, proportion of strategic customers delayed purchase also depends on market potential and ability to quality improvement. Finally, Market potential and quality improvement ability have opposite influence on imitative innovation supply chain and same influence on original supply chain, but whether imitative innovation supply chain expected profits is higher than original supply chain profits also depend on market potential as well as ability to quality improvement.