This is something a family friend helped me to realize. Furthermore, he helped me to realize that I had already done that myself. While it's a generalist statement, the idea behind it is powerful. This is in fact, the way our family friend runs his business. In principle, it's fairly simple. He runs workshops based around certain subjects and lets the group's conversations and interactions decide how the subject matter is revealed within a loose framework. The whole thing works because of his experience and his execution and of course someone could copy the format, but they wouldn't be stealing his product because the product in his case, is generated by a given group of people interacting with each other and him through the filter of their collective experiences and perceptions. Edit: I really think that this fits in well with the presentation theadvancedapes posted earlier.You can't steal execution
I struggle with this a lot too. It seems whenever I come up with an idea, it seems so unoriginal and I always think "Oh that's been done before." and it really bogs me down. But I've come to learn to counter that mentality with "But it hasn't been done your way before."