The United States health care system has several desirable features compared to those of other countries, but it suffers from a central, major problem: a relentless annual growth in its cost. As the authors emphasize, any reform effort that doesn’t tackle this directly and firmly will ultimately be inadequate... [read more...]

Regular visitors to ManyWorlds.com will have previously read about power laws, “black swans,” and the Long Tail. In this article, Michele Zanini applies some of that thinking to help executives better grasp the structure and dynamics of industries across markets and geographies. Over the last decade... [read more...]

After years of impressive profitability, the top 15 companies in the pharmaceutical industry lost $850 billion in shareholder value from December 2000 to February 2008. Among the causes fingered by various commentators are the rise of generics, pricing pressures, regulatory requirements, and legal entanglements... [read more...]

Health care and financial services are converging. The authors describe three types of opportunities emerging from this convergence on which those industries can capitalize by revolutionizing employee benefits: technological integration, new financial arrangements, and unique blended products. As companies... [read more...]

Conclusion

At the foundation of access control is the concept of identity. As well as authenticating users one must successfully associate users with their credentials. This brings a social dimension to the otherwise technical problems involved in building access control infrastructure. Key to building an access... [read more...]

The Approach

Today’s business challenges extend beyond identity management into identity optimization. This means that not only does the business have to worry about bringing new employees, contractors, partners and customers on-board effectively and efficiently, but also that they get all of the appropriate profiles... [read more...]

Identification of Problem

In the early computing days, mainframe computers with single processors were used. Only one program was executed at a time, no shared databases existed; no memory had to be shared, etc. To secure such an environment was easy. A few technical and physical mechanisms were adequate to secure the complete... [read more...]

A study of the relative economics of different approaches to reducing greenhouse gas emissions offers surprising insights for policy makers and business leaders. For starters, in a 25-year perspective, power generation and manufacturing industry offer less than half of the potential for reducing emissions... [read more...]

The business literature frequently features articles and books in which companies are said to resemble organisms destined to pass through the stages of start-up, scaling, maturity, and decline. Sull and Houlder suggest that this view is mistaken. A life cycle does exist but its subjects are business... [read more...]

Look back over the past century and it quickly becomes obvious how far and fast medical treatment has advanced. Yet, as Regina Herzlinger puts it, the packaging and delivery of health care are often inefficient, ineffective, and user unfriendly—not only in the United States but also in most other developed... [read more...]