"Why compete to oneself is better than competing with others"

What I mentioned on the title doesn't makes sense until I learned about the Blue-ocean strategy in business. It is something that completely change the way I think for my business strategies and I think every entrepreneurs should do to.

When I was still school, I had this notion that I should compete with my school mates to be ahead of the class. And looking at how I behave then, I can cpnfidently say to myself how I was doing wrong. I think the learning institutions are making the students to compete and win among the rest of the students without the encouragement to innovate and progress in their creativity. The learning institutions maybe successful at differentiating the good ones from the bad ones. However, it isn't making us a better version of ourselves.

In business scenario, it looks like our competitive nature was so adapted in the way we do things. We compete to other businesses with the goal of being better than anyone else without any valuable improvement or innovation with the product or service that we offer.

My understanding with the blue-ocean strategy is that a business should be competing with its own by innovating the product it offers while making it more valuable for the consumers.

What I noticed in the Philippine business scene is that many entrepreneurs are limiting themselves on whatever the "trend" is, or whatever the consumers are deemed to purchase. If the trend is "milktea", I can bet that there will be milktea shop on every corner of the street that are offering the exact same thing. There are slight tweak on the product but there isn't any valuable improvement to it.

What I realize is that there are no creative process that is being done by the succeeding business since they only replicate whatever the original business have done.

What should happen is that the succeeding businesses that are offering the same product should offer an innovation of the original and with a better value for their money. And if in case that they can't come-up with anything better then they should create an entirely new product to begin with.

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Just my sentiment about the current business trend...