I received an interesting e-mail from a fellow woman entrepreneur the other day that got me thinking. She was attending a trade show she hoped to one day (soon!) be exhibiting at and came across a company who appeared to be a competitor. She was devastated. Before that, she had thought she was the only one hitting her target market with the type of products she was creating. Now, she knew differently.

My first thought was that it is not uncommon for an inventor to think their product is the only one of its kind and more often than not, it’s not. Ideas seem to float around the universe with many inventions hitting the scene at the same time from two different and unconnected sources. Take the integrated circuit for example. Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments invented it in 1959 and then a few months later and completely unassociated, Robert Noyce, an engineer at Fairchild, did the same thing. Strange coincidence, isn’t it?

The other thing I realized is that competition does one of two things. It either motivates you or it completely takes the wind out of your sails. Some people view competition as a challenge and get really fired up by it. That’s great! Unfortunately I have seen many entrepreneurs who are afraid of competition when they really shouldn’t be. Think about it: if there isn’t any competition in a particular market, then either your product is so novel that no one has truly figured it out yet or else there isn’t a market. Where you see other companies selling the same thing it can actually be good news (providing the companies are successful). The truth about competition is that is means there are customers who are willing to buy. That’s a good thing!

True innovation comes when you meet a need in a different way, so the best thing you can do when you come across a new competitor is to learn everything you can about them and then go beat them at their own game.