How can we workaround a competitor's patent

Hi,
I can recommend you a few ways to follow.
1- After a very carefull examination (if possible with a help from a patent attorney) on the competitor's patent, findout what is patented within the patent description and claims. Try to clearly understand the claims and after all, try to find another solution rather than the recent patent which is due to a registration became new prior art. If you can find another way which is not going to be found equivalent to the prior art, then, you will be able to patent it and operate a bussiness.
2- You can make the recent patent right as exhausted by buying the rights of the patent, buying the patented solution from the patent owner as a product or place an offer to the patent owner to sign a license to use the patented solution.
3- A little utopian but you can request a new "patentability search" from a patent search office to try to invalidate the patent. The patent may be wrongly patented because of a careless examination.
I hope this helps.

I have actually done this with Optical Fiber. (See: http://msala.us/root/Homepage/Successes/Successes_Working.html )
The key is to find or make your product better than the competitor's, sometimes referred to as an "improvement patent"

What about the competitor's product is missing or irks its users; you find that issue and add it to your product's Patent Application.

We can take this discussion off-line any time. Martin