Thursday, June 30, 2011

TED - What ideas are worth spreading to you?

Summer school students enrolled in my Entrepreneurship course this month and into next month were shown one of my favorite TED talks "The Opportunity of Adversity" by Aimee Mullins to continue to develop our discussion on ideas vs. opportunities in the context of the entrepreneurial process.  I ask them to use the comments section of this blog entry to share links and briefly explain ideas they find connect what people are good at with something they care about towards solution that create value.

The Burger Business Model Challenge

In class today, we examined how the layers of the burger reflect the type of processes, ingredients and delivery could change the business model of how the burgers are made and sold to different customer groups.  The top ten burger restaurants in the US as rated by a top food magazine you can find through the links provided: Here are 12 different business models delivering America's "Best Burgers".

http://www.dumontburger.com/
http://www.facebook.com/pages/kingdom-Sports-Bar-Grill/190402510128#!/pages/kingdom-Sports-Bar-Grill/190402510128?sk=info
http://www.palenarestaurant.com/cafe.html
http://www.lunchboxlaboratory.com/
http://www.zunicafe.com/
http://www.pienburger.com/
http://www.rouge98.com/
http://www.holeman-finch.com/
http://www.radiusrestaurant.com/
http://www.rosebudrestaurants.com/rest4.php
http://portofcallnola.com/
http://www.bobcatbite.com/

These are top rated though you may have never heard about them.  They offer a similar product that are valued in their local communities. Through this list you can see the product, price, place and promotional variations within a seemlingly single product category.  Find different types of burger business models by modifying ingredients or elements of the 4 p's to illustrate how diverse something everyone has an assumption about (burgers, in this case) can be drastically different.

Be sure to put a link to your example and explain in the comment area.

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Social Enterprise Continuum


My writing partner, Dr. Kyleen Myrah and I wanted to come up with a model that would unite both CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) and SE (Social Enterpreneurship).  We work our first paper on it for the 9th International Conference on Corporate Social Responsibility.  We continued to refine the paper and its on track for acceptance into the Social Responsibility Journal.  In the meantime, we have been testing out the model in the classroom setting and it has proven very successful in getting students to engage in meaningful discussion and plot their own cases of se and csr activity on the tool.  We make it accessible here for students, teachers and researchers and are readying both a research primer and a teaching note to further its application.  If you are visiting this site and want to know more please contact me or leave your comments below.  Here is the model preview:


Future Entrepreneurs

Teaching in higher education in Croatia for almost 20 years, I have mostly been in the private sector.  But I am happy when learners re...