The Blue Plate iPad Special

At least once in every other entrepreneurship class I've taught, students present an idea for automating their food ordering experience in sit-down restaurants. Their arguments are for making (1) wait time for a table more productive, (2) orders more accurate and personalized, (3) menus more flexible and changeable, and (4) inventory and billing more accurate. The start-up costs of implementing such a technology are usually the biggest roadblock to making this idea a reality. Now, the iPad's wide level of adoption has finally made this service possible. As this CNN news report shows, two owners of an Atlanta restaurant have become one of the first to use iPads for orders.

Interestingly, the wait staff seems to spend as much time explaining the iPad concept as they might have spent describing the night's special and taking the order. Plus, does it seem to you like the patrons seem to be awestruck by the iPad and slower in deciding what they want? I imagine that restaurants and customers will begin to use social media with the iPads for Groupons, reviews, and promotions - maybe even a surveillance video of their food being prepared! How can you shape and reshape this idea to create value for the customer?

SportClips - Haircuts for Men

SportClips - Haircuts for MenSport Clips is offering what they call "the perfect place for a guy to get great service and a great haircut." Their mission: "To create a championship haircut experience for men and boys in an exciting sports themed environment." All of the TV monitors show something sports-related, and you're not reading a copy of Cosmo, you're reading ESPN The Magazine, Sports Illustrated, or any of several other types of sports magazines. The pain of waiting for a hair cut is over, right? SportClips' strategy for growth is to do so through franchising. Is this an attractive franchising opportunity for you?

Strategic human capital

Strategic human capital is the “disproportionately productive and valuable individuals employed by a firm who are capable of contributing disproportionately to that firm’s competitive advantage” (my definition). Consistent with the human capital literature, the productivity and value of these individuals arise from the knowledge, skills, and abilities they possess and apply toward the goals of the firm (Pfeffer, 1994). To be a source of competitive advantage, their knowledge, skills, and abilities must be valuable, rare, costly to imitate, and nonsubstitutable (Barney, 1991) and they must also be imperfectly mobile (Peteraf, 1993).

Strategic human capital in new, developing ventures

How to you motivate your “star” employees in the early stage of development without giving away the company. Some companies give their employees enough money to take financial incentives off the table and give them autonomy and non-financial incentives to motivate them. They don’t give stock options because they want their stars to think about the customer instead of the stock.

Venture capitalists traditionally have been reluctant to give funding to start-ups that will essentially be used for salaries unless they understand the value proposition of doing so (motivated talent, keeping stock options off the employee table) because there’s no tangible residual for the VCs and because of causal ambiguity, social complexity, and firm-specificity. Strategic human capital aligns these three attributes of talent with the strategic goals of the firm and the investment interests of the founders and venture capitalists. The question is: “How do you pull this off?”

Human Capital Institute - The Global Association for Strategic Talent Management

Human Capital Institute - The Global Association for Strategic Talent Management. HCI is the global association for talent management and new economy leadership, and a clearinghouse for best practices and new ideas.

Jon Ingham's Strategic HCM Blog - Dan Pink on Drive at the HCI Summit ~ HR to HR 2.0 and Human Capital (HCM)

"Autonomy is the pathway to accountability.  Management may give compliance but more and more we need engagement.  Pink talked about:

Netflix which pays its people well to take the issue off the table but (rare in Silicon Valley) doesn’t give its people stock options as it wants people to think about customers not stock.  And also allows people to take as much vacation as they want.

Facebook where new hires attend a 5 or 6 week boot camp before individuals decide in which team they want to work

Atlassian’s ‘FedEx Days’ where every Thursday, people are told to go and work on anything they want, with whoever they want, in what ever way they want, but need to come back to show people their ideas on Friday afternoons in a free wheeling session.  This one day has led to a whole variety of ideas for fixes, new products and internal processes.  The principle is that employees want to do things for the organisation and these days get the organisation out of their day.

Intuit which announced a new strategy to focus on mobile technology.  None of the departments were able to change direction on a dot, but individual employees created 7 mobile apps in their 10% time before any formal projects even got started."

Read more from Jon Ingham's Strategic HCM blog

America's Most Promising Social Entrepeneurs

This story in Business Week highlights 28 social entrepreneurs. You can vote through April 26 for your favorite entrepreneur. Read the full story here.

Perfect your pitch

Brad Feld offers eight mistakes entrepreneurs should avoid when pitching for capital.