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Steve Jobs once said that innovation distinguishes a leader from a follower. But sometimes it’s safer to follow a leading innovator than to go it alone. That’s clearly been the thought in China where shanzhai products are more abundant than the real thing.

It must have been what the Ukrainian national security secretary was thinking too, when she ‘borrowed’ words from a speech Steve Jobs gave at Stanford in 2005. 

A video of Raisa Bogatyrova giving a graduation speech at Kiev’s National University has gone viral, not because of her charismatic delivery but because she appears to have taken the exact structure and content of a speech Jobs gave to Stanford students in 2005.

Focus Ukraine has a translation of parts of the speech (with some confusing minor errors – our in-house Ukrainian speaker tells us that where she is quoted as saying “his own life and his own political experience” she in fact said “my own life etc”).

Bogatyrova begins by saying she wants to speak about lessons she has learned, and that four things will help guide students later: “your character, destiny, life… karma”.

In his speech Jobs told Stanford students: “You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.”

There are plenty more similarities. OK, you might say, these ideas are pretty big picture, and so what if Bogatyrova borrowed from them – even sharing a near-death experience?

Maybe the point is that, with stories of intellectual property violations reaching fever pitch (who hasn’t read about the fake Apple stores in China?) Bogatyrova has turned herself into the media equivalent of an open goal – there for the taking.

Our in house Ukrainian speaker reckons the speech is nothing to get worked up about – it didn’t surprise him “in the least”. In a country where Mykola Azarov, the prime minister, “can barely string two words together” (Azarov is a native Russian speaker but gives important speeches in Ukrainian), the simple fact that Bogatyrova is a charismatic speaker makes her much more compelling.

“I would guess that the response [in Ukraine] would be – isn’t that what everybody else does?”

So how much should we read into all this? Does it tell us anything about innovation in emerging markets? Not necessarily – many EM brands that started off aping western ones  are now creating products and services that take them a step ahead of staid competitors (like Chinese internet service providers). And as we’ve pointed out in the past, even foreign businesses are being forced to innovate in EM because that is where the customers are – and those customers are demanding something new.

Perhaps the spate of recent stories tells us something else: brands matter.

Related reading:
The intriguing evolution of “China’s Twitter”, FT Techhub
Innovation: Replicators no more, FT
Coke: $1bn jackpot with cut-price juice, beyondbrics