Making your business a leader in the industry

Often, we see many businesses running to catch up with the competition when they come up with a novel idea, product, service or whatever.

I wonder, how come people rush to catch up and copy what the competition is doing well instead of having an ongoing approach to innovation, curiosity and novel ideas? How come businesses seem to be more focus on selling whatever they have instead of creating a wonderful product or service that people will want to have very much and therefore selling by itself?

I wonder how much better would a business do if they start leading the industry instead of following the lead.