Abstract: Increased with the scale and investment intensity of modern science and technology, the lead innovator's income is influenced much more by the behavior of the imitator. The intellectual property right mechanism must be introduced to regulate innovating and imitating in the modern innovative competition. In this paper, different factors which influence the size and the speed of innovators to obtain their incomes are analyzed, and it can be drawn that enterprises in any scale should pay attention to protect their own technology by using intellectual property right. What's more, the competition advantage of innovator and imitator in the cost, risk and income of invention and innovation has also been studied respectively.

Key words: intellectual property right, technology innovator, technological imitators, competition advantage