Prezi and forgetting the competition

A few days ago Sean Low put up a great post on his blog entitled “Forget about the Competition” , inspired by a Facebook post by Rebecca Grinnals , herself inspired by a piece from Trendwatching.com, which included the quote :

Just copying competitors is a race to the bottom

My own jokey comment to Rebecca’s FB post was :

easier surely to create your own niche….I like to think I have no competition…and Rebecca, you are similarly “one of a kind”

Joking aside, no matter what business you are in, far better to find your own way to serve your customers than to copy others.

The world we live in is increasingly dominated by the most important asset of all, Human Capital. Who has it, who understands they need it, who is willing to pay for it to strengthen their business. Whatever business you are in, you must invest in Human Capital, or, sooner rather than later, you will fall down on the wrong side of the “innovate or die” equation.

Now, as a great case study on the above thoughts, last week I was at the GlobalScot conference, the highlight of which for me was a workshop on innovation, covering innovation in many areas, from how to turn renting generators into a worldwide leader that continues to race ahead of their competition faster than they can catch up, to how the Law Society of Scotland is focussed on taking their most “traditional” of businesses and innovating to create “blue ocean” between themselves and their competitors.

The moderator, Colin Burns of Martach Consulting, insisted on an innovative way of presenting, Pecha Kucha , in which powerpoints must be presented in 20 slides, each for 20 seconds. The last of the four presenters, Chris van der Kuyl of BrightSolid, upped the ante by doing his Pecha Kucha presentation using Prezi instead of powerpoint. Take a look at the Prezi presentation below (and note my choice of the presentation used, speaks to how quickly our future is moving), and ask yourself two questions :

• Did Prezi copy the competition in creating their product ?
• Does Prezi HAVE any competition ?