I don't know if those examples show 'outcompeting'. The overall picture of various countries doesn't show late growers exceeding the absolute wealth of early growers (maybe one would predict this based on cultural/human-capital/institution theories?).

As far as Western industrialization went, the big players in roughly chronological order were the UK, Netherlands, France, USA, & Austria/Germany. It seems fair to call them the 'innovators', and you seem to have only East Asian countries in mind, so I'll look at just China/Taiwan/Korea (South, but not North)/Japan/Hong Kong (which I think is all of them) as 'imitators'.

Consider their wealth (GDP PPP per capita); in descending order it goes: United States (10), Hong Kong (10), Netherlands/Belgium (13/24), Austria/Germany (16/17), Taiwan (22), France (26), Japan (27), UK (28), South Korea (30), and 60 places way down the list is China (89).

How badly are they outcompeted? Well, South Korea & China beat none of them, Japan just barely edges out the UK (which we might attribute to socialist decay), Taiwan is past France & the UK but is pretty small, and Hong Kong is even more exceptional (tiny & UK-founded). In general, it seems to be better to be an 'innovator' than a (successful) 'imitator'.

If I drop Hong Kong as too tiny and exceptional, the permutations seem to be going in the direction of innovation being better too:

R> countries <- data.frame(PPP=c( 10, 10, 13, 24, 16, 17, 22, 26, 27, 28, 30, 89),
Innovator=c(TRUE, FALSE, TRUE, TRUE, TRUE, TRUE, FALSE, TRUE, FALSE, TRUE, FALSE, FALSE))
R> wilcox.test(PPP ~ Innovator, data=countries)
Wilcoxon rank sum test with continuity correction
data: PPP by Innovator
W = 24.5, p-value = 0.2903

At least, if the East Asians are 'outcompeting', it doesn't look like it's clearly happened yet.