Here's a metaphor about a special case where invention is justified.
Suppose you have no cell phone and you need to get to your mad science lab before your apprentice does so that you can lock up the monster you created the night before — otherwise it will eat him. You spot him ten cars ahead of you on the two-lane highway, but he doesn't notice you.
It is 100% guaranteed that he will arrive at the lab before you if you stay behind him on the highway. Then the monster will eat him.
There's a shortcut to the mad science lab through the back roads. Usually the highway is faster, but every once in a while the highway has a traffic jam and the back roads don't. If you take the back roads, you have a 30% chance of reaching the lab before your apprentice.
30% is better than 0%, so that's what you should do. Even though the back roads are probably slower, they're your only possible way to win the race.
In a business context, you may find yourself competing against an incumbent strictly on the basis of their core competency. If you have no way out of that situation, one possible strategy is to pursue an angle of development that is simply different from theirs — even if your best knowledge suggests that their angle is probably the best one. Your only hope is that they run into an unexpected traffic jam on the road they're taking, and that you're on a different road.
My reading is that this is basically the story of AMD64. As I understand it, mainstream opinion in the late 90s and early 2000s was that we were going to have to import some version of VLIW's explicit ILP into CPU design in order to keep getting single-threaded performance improvements, so that was what Intel went with for their 64-bit CPU architecture. AMD announced their alternative path, hobbling themselves with backward compatibility, in 1999.
They got lucky: Intel's "Itanium" turned out to be an Itanic; it hit a performance iceberg and sank, and since 1999, AMD64 has become the mainstream CPU architecture, displacing not only i386, but also PowerPC, SPARC, Alpha, MIPS (except in the very low-end), PA-RISC, POWER, System 360, AS/400, and half a dozen vector supercomputer architectures. (Alpha, PA-RISC, and the AS/400 aren't even on the market any more. SPARC, POWER, System 360, and vector supercomputers are still available, but most of their uses have been replaced with AMD64, running Linux.)