The issue of competition was not prompted or raised by the research team but by survey participants themselves. Interestingly, the issue “Competition” was most frequently raised in responses related to “Collaboration and Cooperation”.

In discussing competition in this chapter, we begin with a comment of one of the participants in the study who claimed that competition was about “kill or be killed”. This may be an extravagant assertion but the passion and often virulence with which comments were made about this issue indicates how competition is viewed and experienced in the sector.

In this chapter we first make some general observations. We then focus on three important sub-issues that arose in the research:
•    Levels of competition
•    Proprietary intellectual knowledge
•    Heterogeneity

The concept of competition in the sector is then questioned and a number of factors are offered as the basis for the problem.  The factors include:
•    The way in which collaboration is viewed in the sector;
•    The sector’s capacity (or lack of) to innovate;
•    The reactive culture in the sector;
•    Symptom or cause (revisited);
•    The conception of competition current in the sector.

We suggest that the best “explanation” for our observations is found in the conception of “contract competition” embedded in the policy-ideology of Government. The need for further enquiry about the nature of competition is proposed in the final section of the chapter.

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