The Fast-Economy assumes that competition is everywhere, that everything can be reduced to a SWOT analysis, Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, and Threat. It is natural that everything is seen in terms of competition. As a result, concentration of resources in only a few hands is expected. Copyright, Patents, and Industrial Designs are seen as protections for commercial "Trade Secrets" and as a result, submarine patents, and Multiple patents on the same process are seen as ways of protecting a product against copying.

The slow-economy assumes that ideas are just a stepping stone for more ideas. Copyrights become copylefts, and patents become chomby patents a way of asserting claim more on the source of a stream of ideas, than on a product. An open source hardware product for instance publishes all the requisite information to redesign the product and asserts the open source nature of the product and demands that its source be respected.

An example of such a product, is a 3D printer, which includes all the instructions on how to make another 3D printer. Called RepRap, there are two ways to achieve ownership, to buy the complete printer off of the open source manufacturer, or to build your own from the plans and parts created by another 3D printer.

A company called evil scientist laboratories, has even developed a prototype capable of making 3D structures from carmelized sugar. The idea being that local manufacturing industries can be based on a local prototyping facility that can cheaply create 3D structures from publically available designs. The ideas openly available across the Internet can be locally manufactured without requiring shipping of anything but the base materials such as the sugar or plastic filaments used to build the 3D prototypes.

Despite giving their designs away, a growing number of open source corporations have succeeded in creating markets for their products and competing in the Fast economy. Based mostly on the idea, of Kit oriented electronics companies, they often started out with a mandate to train others in the art of electronics, and developed popular products, that became useful enough to sell well. This business model seems to fly in the face of the assumption that you need to protect yourself against competition by protecting your designs against copying. In fact, most of these companies actively encourage others to copy and improve their basic projects. Their success is an argument against over-concentration of resources and overly competitive practices.