I have decided to give you a very interesting post for the day. You might be asking wtf is this guy talking about? A business paradox?
Let me explain. Say you own a small business and your business sells ties. Say that across the street a larger tie selling business pops up and is offering ties at a cheaper rate and is more innovative at selling ties. You might think how the hell am I going to compete with this larger and more powerful tie company?
You could always copy the ideas of the larger tie company and offer similar if not identical services but then you risk getting ridiculed and called a “copier”. Not to mention the inevitable lawsuit that would follow for “copying” ideas.
The best solution would be to think up new and improved ideas, right? This would require thinking outside the box and what some think would be countless hours of time formulating innovation. Honestly you would end up thinking to hard and spending all that time for nothing. Trust me I have been down this road and it does not end well.
So what if I said you could beat out your competition just by stealing? Now before you go off and call the popo. I am not talking about stealing ties from your competition. I am talking about stealing ideas. This does not mean you need to go all Mission Impossible. It means stop thinking about how other tie companies are beating you and think about how other companies not in direct competition with you are doing their business.
In this example lets use a a fictional company called Buy Club. The Buy Club stores give shoppers memberships that allow them to exclusively shop their stores and get discounted prices. Why could you not just steal the membership idea for your business and offer something innovative your competitors don’t? Thus solving the Business Paradox 
I strongly feel that most people try so hard to find out what “thinking outside the box” means and not really thinking outside the box. I am sure if you look at some of the most innovative ideas in business you can narrow the origin of said ideas to many companies across many fields. Overall thinking outside the box is more literal then we might think. Think outside your own market and steal ideas from other markets. In the end making you the innovator by not constricting your ideas to one field.
Thoughts, ideas? Leave a comment!
Yesterday I did a video on a cool service called Yammer (http://yammer.com). What Yammer allows you to do is make something similar to a twitter page for your business. In this sense this allows employees from a small, medium, or large business to collaborate just as people do on twitter.
Yammer takes it a step further than twitter and allows co-workers to post attachments and even assign roles or positions to users. I truly love this idea/concept and I can see modernized business taking this and running. In my mind this is a great way for employees from all over the nation or even globe to collaborate and share experiences that will not only help the employee learn but also help your business or organization accomplish tasks in a more efficient manner.
For more information please watch the video:
Hosts:
Dan Peters
David Ford
Grady Joslin
Excerpt:
On this week’s episode of Geekologist Deep Dish Radio, Dan, Dave, and Grady are talking data. The show starts out with a discussion about what kind of data is created in both the home and business environments, and what it is used for. The team then discuss the value of data in various business scenarios, such as product and customer data for retail shops, financial data for banks and credit card companies, and medical data in the health care industry. After a brief rant about software data collection and computer security, the discussion continues with the differences between structured and unstructured data, as well as a sneak peek of future episodes relating to data storage optimization and data availability.