Competition is for survival. Sur/petition is for success.
Competition is the critical ingredient in free-market economics. It prevents monopoly pricing and ensures that consumers get the best deal. It also ensures that producers make every effort to be efficient and to provide quality. if not, they risk being driven out of business by a producer who offers better prices or quality.
The purpose of the competition is to benefit the consumer by keeping prices down and quality up. The competition also helps the economy by ensuring the most efficient use of resources and encouraging enterprise. New businesses with better ideas, prices, or quality can enter the field and compete against those already in it. Then there is a great deal to be said for competition.
The competition benefits the economy as a whole and consumers. Only part of the benefit of competition is for the producers. To be sure, producers are driven to greater productivity and efficiency, but these benefits are not reflected in greater profits, only in survival.
Companies put much effort into competing with one another, but the result may be merely the same existing market share for each. However, the competition allows the more effective producer to increase market share at the expense of the less efficient producer, sales volume may go up, but margins and profits may not.
In short, competition puts pressure on the producers. You have to be competitive to survive. Just as labor costs and environmental concerns or pressures on producers, so also is competition.
Sur/petition
Sur/petition is concerned with how you move forward from the baseline. Physical monopolies are illegal in many countries, and value monopolies are not. Value monopolies are for the benefit of the producers and are also in the interest of consumers. Companies are now moving away from survival economics and toward value economics.
Value economics means that consumers can choose what value means for them. You decide to buy something because you value it. Today, sur/petition and value monopolies are very much in the general economic interest. Value economics is about creating opportunities for spending money as you wish.
So value economics, sir petition, and value monopolies benefit the economy, consumers, and producers, which contrasts a competitive economy.
Classic competition certainly needs to be there; otherwise, the benefits of value economics will quickly disappear. But once the classic competition is in place, it is no longer sufficient. We also need sur/petition to make value economics work. Sony Walkman is a good example. Sony kept improving and improving the Walkman and is still the leader today. The real value of the Walkman story is not in recognizing its creation but in its potential success and running with it. They did not sit back and relish their success. They started producing model after model. There are over 100 other competitors offering very similar models, but Sony is still the leader.
Some people are disillusion with innovation because they claim they put in the development costs and open up the market, and then new companies jump in and take all the profits. That is what happens if you sit back. You have to create your own race against potential new competitors, which is what sur/petition is all about.
See also, How To Create Value Monopolies, Part Two
