Take It and Make It Your Own – How to Steal a Business Idea and Make It Flourish

I have recently often picked up the book on hardball business strategies as I’ve researched for my Sun Tzu series. In the latest stratagem piece I talked about two hardball strategies. In the book sandwiched (literally) between them was another interesting hardball strategy, Take It and Make It Your Own.

Take It and Make It Your Own

Take It and Make It Your Own means that you recognize the value of an existing idea, practice or business model and make it your own, improve and strengthen the concept and run with it. If you are a hardball player, you are always on the lookout for ideas that you can adopt or adapt to your own business.

This means that you are an avid student of trade practices, pricing schemes, technologies, marketing and selling methods, customer service programs and other facets of business that are better than your own not just in your own industry and among competitors, but across industries and markets. Often new radical business innovations in a particular market are actually imported and adapted from another industry where they have been staple practice for years or even decades.

Meanwhile in the real world, Kisko Labs has gotten involved in two business development projects where we would be playing our own version of this hardball strategy with existing players in the market should the projects go forward as anticipated and planned. Here’s a couple of tips from the book and a few personal thoughts how to adapt an idea to your business and make it flourish.

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