Health Care, Policy, Economics, Supply Chain - from Knowledge@Wharton

Leadership and Change Health Care Activist Steve Davis: Avoiding the 'I'll Give Back Later' Trap
Steve Davis is president and CEO of PATH, an international nonprofit whose goal is to help communities break longstanding cycles of poor health. The cross-sectoral skills he has accumulated during earlier work in other organizations, he says, are crucial when it comes to adapting innovations to the places that need them most. In a recent interview, he talks about his approach to leadership, the importance of strategic partnerships, the effort to eradicate malaria in northern Africa and how to avoid the 'I'm-going-to-give-back-later [to society]' trap. http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/3192.cfm 

Leadership and Change Nancy Brinker's Education on the Road to Eradicating Breast Cancer
Nancy Goodman Brinker promised her sister, who died of breast cancer in 1980 at age 36, that she would find a cure for the disease. Within two years, Brinker had launched Susan G. Komen for the Cure, a foundation which has raised nearly $2 billion primarily for breast cancer research. During a Wharton Leadership Lecture, Brinker shared the lessons she has learned since launching the foundation more than 30 years ago. http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/3190.cfm

Health Economics
Helping Employees to Be Healthier: How About a Sweepstakes?
In order to design effective wellness programs, most large companies are now asking employees to complete health risk assessments (HRAs) -- questionnaires that ask them to reveal such details as their weight, blood pressure and family history of disease. Experts agree that HRAs can be a useful tool, but only if employees actually bother to fill them out. A recent study co-authored by Wharton health care management professor Kevin Volpp suggests one way to encourage workers to do so. http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/3195.cfm

Operations Management
Finding a Common Language for Disaster-resistant Supply Chains
Disasters such as Superstorm Sandy, the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan and the volcanic ash cloud that disrupted international airplane flights for several days in 2010 have highlighted the need for companies to better prepare for potential risks to their supply chains. A number of groups are working to create a common framework to help firms accomplish this, but experts note that the increasingly complex nature of the modern supply chain -- and a tendency by many companies to be reactive rather than proactive when it comes to disasters -- are hindering the effort. http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/3193.cfm 

Help Spread Knowledge Do you know people who might be interested in these research studies and more? If you do, please forward this e-mail message to them. The Knowledge@Wharton Newsletter is a free service of the Wharton School (http://www.wharton.upenn.edu/) of the University of Pennsylvania. Its companion web site, Knowledge@Wharton, includes full details of the stories listed here. To read these stories, go to http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/ To read Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women, our portal for women entrepreneurs, visit: http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/10000women/ To read Arabic Knowledge@Wharton, our Arabic/English Partnership http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/arabic/ To read India Knowledge@Wharton http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/india/ To read Universia-Knowledge@Wharton, our Spanish/Portuguese Partnership http://www.wharton.universia.net To read the Chinese Version of Knowledge@Wharton http://www.knowledgeatwharton.com.cn To comment on these stories, go to: http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/feedback.cfm To unsubscribe from this newsletter, visit: http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/unsubscribe.cfmSponsorship Inquiries Visit our media kit to find out about opportunities to sponsor Knowledge@Wharton special reports, newsletters, and our site. http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/media/ Write Knowledge@Wharton The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania 3620 Locust Walk - Suite 202 Philadelphia, PA 19104

© 2007 The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania

Why America Is Losing the Race for Entrepreneurial Talent

In 2005, immigrant entrepreneurs launched 52% of all startups in Silicon Valley. But today, the number has dropped to 44%, and America is not only losing the opportunity to create new jobs but also losing its competitive edge, argues Vivek Wadhwa in his short, passionately argued book, The Immigrant Exodus: Why America Is Losing the Global Race to Capture Entrepreneurial Talent. Unlike during the 1980s, when skilled immigrants could get green cards (that let them become permanent residents of the U.S.) in as little as 18 months, today it can take as long as 17 years. Failure to fix this problem, says Wadhwa in an interview with Knowledge@Wharton, is killing American innovation and entrepreneurship.

An edited transcript of the interview appears below:

Knowledge@Wharton:Vivek, I wonder if you could tell our audience about your own immigrant experience and the role it played in shaping your research and your book.

Vivek Wadhwa:I was in New York in the 1960s as a child, and being in America is quite an experience. I left [the U.S.] in the late sixties, but I'd always wanted to come back. The first chance I got was in 1980, when my father got transferred to the consulate in New York City. I joined Xerox, and within a year and a half of coming here, I was able to get a green card. In my mind, the day I got my green card, I became an American. I started thinking like an American, behaving like an American, working like an American. There was no other country for me in the world. It was that easy.

A decade after coming here, I ended up founding my first company. The company grew to the point where it employed 1,000 people. We took it public, and it was a wonderful success. Then I started another company, which employed almost 250 people. I was able to do all this because it was so easy to become an American in the 1980s if you had the right skills. You can't do that anymore, and that is a problem.

Now I teach at Duke, Stanford, Berkeley, Harvard and so on, and I hear the same horror stories from my students over and over again -- that they want to stay [in America], but they can't get a visa. Then others start talking about the fact that their friends have gone home, and that they're doing really well back home. And they say, "We'd like to stay here to get a couple of years of experience." They apply for jobs, but companies won't hire them because they need H1B visas, and there aren't H1B visas, or the companies don't want to go through the negativity of being associated with H1B visas. It is lose-lose for the students and the companies. The result is that skilled people are leaving America in droves. If I had come here now, I would have been stuck in immigration limbo, like my students are. I would never have started a company. I would never have contributed to American competitiveness. I would never have been able to do anything with this great country if I was coming here today. That's what the book is all about.

Knowledge@Wharton:So why do you think the experience of skilled immigrants today is so different than yours was?

Wadhwa:Because when I applied for my green card, there was no backlog, there was no delay in visa processing. I simply had to go through the labor certification process, which showed that I wasn't taking away the job of an American, and then immediately I got my green card. The whole process was as easy as could be. Today, the problem is that, first of all, there are no H1B visas for people to come here and work for American companies. And then, once you start the process for a green card, there are no green cards available. The line for green cards is so long that if you're Indian or Chinese, it takes decades.

What happens now is that you decide that you want to become a permanent resident, and your company files for you, and it takes five years, ten years, 15 years, sometimes 17 or 20 years while you're just stuck in limbo, waiting for that green card. The problem is that, once you have started the process of a green card and you've done the labor certification, which means that you've now proven that you're not taking away the job of an American, you're stuck in that same job. You can't change jobs. In those five, 10 or 15 years, you can't go from being a program analyst to being a project manager. You can't go from being a writer to an editor. You can't change jobs; you're stuck in the same grunt job that you had when you started the process, so people waste their lives in the same tedious jobs that they had before.

Knowledge@Wharton:One of the things you point out in your book is that skilled immigrants play a huge role in the U.S. economy. I wonder if you could please outline their contributions to job growth and intellectual capital formation.

to continue...

美国在企业家人才竞赛中落败的原因探秘

Multinationals from Emerging Markets: Making a Virtue out of Necessity

In recent times, emerging markets have attracted a great deal of attention from the rest of the world because they have become the motors of global economic growth. This has been accompanied by two distinct trends: a boom in investment from corporations in developed nations, and the rise of homegrown multinationals. A recent book by Wharton management professor Mauro F. Guillén and Esteban Garcia-Canal, professor of business at the University of Oviedo, explores the winning strategies of emerging multinationals as well as the lessons that can be learned from today's more globalized distribution of power.

Knowledge@Wharton spoke with the authors of Emerging Markets Rule: Growth Strategies of the New Global Giants to examine this phenomenon in greater depth.

An edited version of the transcript appears below.

Knowledge@Wharton: What factors are responsible for precipitating the internationalization process of companies from emerging markets?

Mauro. F. Guillén: Emerging markets have become key launching pads for new multinational firms. Many enjoy production cost advantages in the home country. Others have ventured abroad using the brands and technologies developed in an emerging economy, which have proved to be useful in developed markets as well as other emerging economies. They have also learned in the home country how to deal with government regulation. The global economy has become a two-way street: Firms from emerging economies are now every bit as capable and competitive as companies from the U.S., Europe and Japan. The global playing field is now level.

K@W: In terms of their numbers, how important are emerging-market multinational firms?

click to continue interview