People can easily take your idea and copy your strategic positioning if you let them. Now, if your strategy is well performed in action, it'll be much more difficult to copy your concept.

You don't need to get all paranoid about your ideas but you need to be effective, especially if you know that you have a great opportunity to catch.

1. Speed of Action

The soon as you begin implementing an idea, you're taking a risk (which is not a bad thing). The thing here is that when you've finally showcased your idea, it will take time to develop it into the result in which you desire. So during this time, especially in the beginning, other innovators can look at your undone product or service and then decide to make it better, and further more complete it faster than you so that they can be the forefront of peoples' minds instead of you. The lesson here is that you need to take action and come to realize that the world won't wait for you.

Strategic Puzzle

A strategy that consists of you selling vanilla ice cream in parks, can easily be imitated because every performance is clear in the enemies' eyes of how you're doing your business. There are many diverse parts that together makes a strategy, so your mission is to collect these parts and make them work together in a reinforcing way. For instance, instead of just selling ice cream, you can sell various types of ice creams, and on Sundays you might offer them at half price and only on Mondays do you sell cookies along with them. A strategy is built of various activities that help each other.

Take Choices

Be willing to take choices and gamble some. Do things people in your market isn't already doing and make it look natural. The uniquer you are, the quicker will people spot you and comprehend that it's from you they can get that certain experience.

Narrow down your idea to be so simple that others say "It's so obvious, why didn't I come up with that?", then apply your structured strategy on it. So in short: simple idea, complex strategy. This makes is very difficult to imitate.

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