Jim Correll, director Fab Lab ICC at Independence Community College, Independence Kansas 

I would not want anyone to think I frequented pool halls as I was going to high school so I’ll relate this story through a friend that did. The game of snooker is a cue game played on a table larger than a pool table and with smaller pockets, making shots more difficult. In snooker, points are made by sinking the correct balls into the pockets. Besides the larger table and smaller pockets, in snooker you can actually have points deducted if you hit the wrong ball first or if your cue-ball doesn’t hit any other balls at all. When you manage to leave the balls in position where your opponent finds it difficult or impossible to hit the correct ball first, he or she is “snookered” and at a high risk of losing points. Thus, part of the strategy in snooker is to try to “snooker” the other player, forcing the loss of points. We, I mean my friend, had a class-mate named Brad that was a pretty good shot, but would get so involved in trying to snooker the opponent that he often lost the game, not making many points for himself. It’s hard to make your own points when your main focus is causing the opponent to lose points. 

Competition in the marketplace is a good thing and can be responsible for many innovations and improvements in products and services. Like Brad, however, some businesses, are so busy trying to beat their competition and make them lose that they don’t do much good at bringing added value to their customers. 

The phone companies are a good example of this. Their marketing messages are so busy telling us to dislike what the competition is doing; they don’t do such a good job of telling us what benefits we’ll receive by using their own products. 

Some auto dealerships speak of “crushing their competition” and even the auto manufacturers join in the counterproductive message of putting down their competition instead of proclaiming their own benefits. 

Health care institutions, relatively new to the concept of competition, also sometimes get caught up in this game too. They usually don’t overtly call out the other ones’ services or doctors as bad, but there are subtle messages between the lines that put down the competition instead of sticking strictly to a message that “we’re here to take care of you in the best way possible.” 

Besides the fact that many consumers are turned off and tune out the noise of these marketing messages that merely put down the competition, there’s another cost. Within a given market, there often are not many break-through innovations when all the players are down in the weeds slugging each other in their marketing messages. 

Henry Ford could have gone around talking about how poorly the horse-drawn wagons and carriages of the day were, but instead, he developed a break-through innovation and came up with a way to make cars affordable to the average family of the time. 

Competition is the backbone of free enterprise and those with an entrepreneurial mindset are always looking for ways to improve current offerings of products and services. When done right, competition can lead to break-through innovation and better use of our resources. When the players in the market merely engage in trying to “snooker” the completion, no one really gains. 

Jim Correll is the director of Fab Lab ICC at the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship on the campus of Independence Community College. He can be reached at (620) 252-5349 or by email at jcorrell@indycc.edu.