I agree with Barbara. Of course what matters above all is the quality of the staff. It is what customers perceive and thus it is what makes the value of your business. From this point of view, new technologies may help. The trend of these technologies is to share know-how and to develop skills thanks to communication through communities and social networks like the one we are building here... I believe it's a new chance for small companies. Because big companies will be unable to share (because their habits is to believe that competition need secret keeping). Small companies, at least the most gifted among them, won't be afraid to share (with clients, with universities, with other members of networks...), that's why they will be more innovative, and talents won't be afraid to join them. That's a good thing. Because the kind of talents that are required nowadays is no more talents for cutting costs, manage budgets and ROI rates, but talents for create new things and convince customers to be the pioneers in order to capture new markets and new niches.
 

Staff is the most important. As nothing would be accomplished without it. As an entrepreneur one understands this because as an entrepreneur you are your product.

However the biggest problems for entrepreneurs always has been getting the right personnel. Not so much because the personnel is not out there, but because small business can not pay them, what they want. So what possible solutions are there for entrepreneurs?
1. Understand that people can learn. Especially if you have high expectations of their abilities. If someone does not want to learn, maybe you should let him be and you need to find someone else who is willing to learn.
2. Find someone who wants to work together with you, to develop your product.
3. Allot time for personnel development. As an entrepreneur you want to do everything yourself, but that is impossible if your goal is to make you product available to everybody. So in the beginning you should set aside time for thinking about the development of your personnel. Not just time for recruitment and selection, but also development and evaluation. As you get more personnel you might want to divide those tasks between you and your new colleagues. But you need to set time aside, as you would do for your accountant and the tax officer. Maybe it will slow down your growth, but it will make you independent from the personnel market, because you decide who you hire and what his future qualities need to and will be.
4. Not only make a business plan for your product, but also a personnel plan, with the qualities you think that are needed. Write down what the minimum requirements for someone's qualities are, to be able to develop to the desired level. If you recruit new personnel you can ask them if they would be willing to follow a program to develop the needed qualities. If the money is not there to pay for the development, what could you as an entrepreneur do to help your personnel develop themselves?
5. When you start to grow and you do not have the money to pay for external training, maybe you should start cooperating with other entrepreneurs, that are looking for the same kind of qualities in personnel and create a development pool. If every entrepreneur in the pool sets aside time to help develop each others personnel, you get a reasonably cheap way of developing and training. And maybe the cooperation creates new products or other possibilities.

So maybe development of personnel is not so much a problem of finding the right one or ones, but getting the right mindset towards how to solve your needs.  

Staff and innovation are important. It is difficult to find the right staff. I have learned that good knowledge of human potential is very important.
Not having a HR department, I could solve this problem by having somebody with a lot of HR experience in my board of advisors. This really helps to evaluate people.

Moreover, dare to be demanding. Better not to recruit somebody than to recruit a person with the wrong capacities.
But ... always believe in the capacities of the persons you recruit.  

I agree that staff are the key. My biggest problem is finding them and the how do you train them to get the correct skills while trying to expand and keep things rolling? The best people don't have the skills (no fault of their own) and the people that have the skills never seem to apply. I dream about being big enough to hire a human resources manager.  

With the standardisation, globalisation, etc... the difference is finally made by staff and teams.  

I agree that the quaility of the staff ads the greatest value to a business. Nevertheless, the importance of innovation and integrating new technologies can not be underestimated. I somehow miss that in the chart above.