Academia is rife with competition. As they say, the battles are so fierce because the stakes are so small. The open source community and Wikipedia are great ex

Academia is rife with competition. As they say, the battles are so fierce because the stakes are so small. The open source community and Wikipedia are great examples of cooperation. The biggest advances in business are usually by people who are completely focused on customer needs and ignore competition (google up until their google+ fascination, Elon musk, apple prior to android's success. Note how google hasn't made any advances from their competition with Facebook, and how Apple hasnt advanced the iPhone much since they started competing with Android).