Take accounting as an example. If you're planning to go into business as a certified public accountant, then your competition, most likely, is going to be made up of all of those other CPAs and accounting firms listed in the yellow pages of your local telephone directory. On the other hand, if you're introducing a new service, then you won't have to worry about direct competitors. Of course, you'll have more work to do than if you were going into an established field, but once you create it and develop your markets, you'll have them all to yourself-at least for awhile. That doesn't necessarily mean you won't have other kinds of competition, however.
Competition can sometimes take the form of a market's reluctance to accept new ideas.
For example, suppose you see a need for a widget delivery service in your area. Everyone has widgets and they need to have them moved from one place to another, but until now, no one has thought of creating such a delivery service. It's a great opportunity for you because there are no widget delivery services to compete with you. You'll have a corner on the whole widget delivery market. But when you look closer, you realize that over the history of widgets, people have worked out ways to get their widgets from one place to another-through the mail, for instance.