Mark Hennricks in Entrepreneur magazine (December 1999) warns that you should not count on friendly competition; if you do, your rivals might just steal your customers from under your ..........

Potential competitors for Sparks.com, an online retailer of real greeting cards, run the ........., from the corner gift shop to Amazon.com.

That awareness was ......... home during a recent meeting with executives of another company, supposedly to explore setting up a strategic alliance with Lindau's 70-person firm.

"One of them laid down a briefcase and out popped one of our business plans from a year ago, which they had clearly obtained through ......... we had not intended," recalls Lindau.

"Someone to whom we had given a ......... copy of our business plan had shared it with our competition."

Query vendors, customers, consultants and others who ......... business with companies in and around your field to find out if and when new competitors are likely to emerge.

Lindau says venture capitalists represent a fruitful source for competitive information for her because due ......... requires investors to research related businesses before backing a company.

Companies that occupy spots on your value chain often understand your business and customers well enough to become ......... rivals.

Carefully ......... firms that have mastered technology similar to yours, even if they appear to operate in distant sectors.

No one wins every sale, but if you start to lose sales to companies you've never heard of, you may be ......... the birth of new and unexpected competitors, and your early warning system may be faulty.