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?

Inc. Magazine - 6 Essential Skills Every Entrepreneur Should Have

Starting and building a company is all about leadership: formulating an idea, building a unique plan based on vision and experience, and forging a path over and through all obstacles. Yet the image of leadership in business is at an all-time low, according to national leadership experts, considering the political debacles, record business bankruptcies, and executive fraud cases.

Read the entire article here.

Entrepreneurship 101: A Guide for New College Grads Looking to Fly Solo - DailyFinance

Entrepreneurship 101: A Guide for New College Grads Looking to Fly Solo - DailyFinance: "Out of a group of 1,000 college students and recent grads, more than a third of them (36%) were side-preneurs -- they started businesses while getting their degrees, and about 1 in 5 (21%) started businesses after college because they couldn't find a job."

Peter Thiel Gives Whiz Kids $100K To Quit College, Start Businesses | Fast Company

Peter Thiel Gives Whiz Kids $100K To Quit College, Start Businesses | Fast Company: "what happens when 24 people, picked to live among mentors and innovation experts, stop going to school and start getting real--in business."

Would you, dear students, drop out of college to start a business if someone gave you $100,000 to do so? How much does it matter to you to have the mentors and innovation experts at your disposal? What if you could use your college money to start your own business instead of going to classes and use your professors as mentors and advisors? I think it's an interesting proposition. Show us what you think in the quick survey below!

8 tips for success in less than four minutes - TED Talks

SBA's "Top 10 Tips" for Starting a Business

Less a checklist to success than a series of cheerful slogans. What are your top 10 tips for starting a business?

Small Business Growth - "One Size Does Not Fit All"

Small businesses that strive to grow put their very survival at risk. Bain.com's recommended reading list for business strategy includes at least one book that addresses this difficult topic. How the recommendations apply to small business needs to be carefully considered. "One size does not fit 'small.'"


From Bain.com

Beyond the Core: Expand Your Market Without Abandoning Your Roots
Harvard Business School Publishing 11/13/2003
by Chris Zook
All companies must grow to survive--but only one in five growth strategies succeeds. In Profit from the Core, strategy expert Chris Zook revealed how to grow profitably by focusing on and achieving full potential in the core business. But what happens when your core business provides insufficient new growth or even hits the wall? In Beyond the Core, Zook outlines an expansion strategy based on putting together combinations of adjacency moves into areas away from, but related to, the core business, such as new product lines or new channels of distribution. These sequences of moves carry less risk than diversification, yet they can create enormous competitive advantage, because they stem directly from what the company already knows and does best.  For more information, please visit www.beyondthecore.com.


Source for book description: Bain.com