Do governance, equity characteristics, and venture capital nvolvement affect long-term wealth creation in U.S. health care and biotechnology IPOs?

Agency theory remains the dominant means of examining governance issues and ownership characteristics related to large organizations. Research in these areas within large organizations has increased our understanding, yet little is known about the influence that these mechanisms and characteristics have had on IPO firm performance. This study tests an agency perspective that venture capital involvement, governance and equity characteristics affect health care and biotechnology IPO firm performance. Our results indicate that there is no correlation between these factors and health care and biotechnology IPO wealth creation. For these entrepreneurs, our findings suggest a contingent approach for the use of these mechanisms.

The industry in Europe: more together than apart

How different is the United Kingdom from the rest of Europe? This, the second of a three-part report on the findings of Medical Device Technology's annual market survey, looks at a country whose health-care delivery is going through considerable change.

The Impact of Physician Entrepreneurship on Escalating Health Care Costs

Health care costs in this country are escalating at an alarming rate. Many economists predict this rate is unsustainable due to the long-term financial burden on our citizenry. Moreover, our health care delivery is fragmented and wasteful. United States health care is ranked last among the industrialized nations. Proponents of the U.S. system of health care extoll the virtues of our "free market." This article explores the role of physician entrepreneurship in the perversion of the marketplace of health care delivery. Medicine has become overcommercialized at the expense of patients and taxpayers. The time has come to implement legislative measures to redirect our dysfunctional health care system. This article explores the role of physician entrepreneurship in rising health care costs. Under the wrong circumstances, the invisible hand of the free market can become dysfunctional.

Building breakthrough businesses within established organizations

Many companies assume that once they've launched a major innovation, growth will soon follow. It's not that simple. High-potential new businesses within established companies face stiff headwinds well after their inception. That's why a company's emphasis must shift: from ideas to execution and from leadership excellence to organizational excellence. The authors spent five years chronicling new businesses at the New York Times Company, Analog Devices, Corning, Hasbro, and other organizations. They found that a breakthrough new business (referred to as NewCo) rarely coexists gracefully with the established business in the company (called CoreCo). The unnatural combination creates three specific challenges--forgetting, borrowing, and learning--that NewCo must meet in order to survive and grow. NewCo must first forget some of what made CoreCo successful. NewCo and CoreCo have elemental differences, so NewCo must leave behind CoreCo's notions about what skills and competencies are most valuable. NewCo must also borrow some of CoreCo's assets--usually in one or two key areas that will give NewCo a crucial competitive advantage. Incremental cost reductions, for example, are never a sufficient justification for borrowing. Finally, NewCo must be prepared to learn some things from scratch. Because strategic experiments are highly uncertain endeavors, NewCo will face several critical unknowns. The more rapidly it can resolve those unknowns--that is, the faster it can learn--the sooner it will zero in on a winning business model or exit a hopeless situation. Managers can accelerate this learning by planning more simply and more often and by comparing predicted and actual trends.

Bioscience industry in metro Atlanta

One of the world's fastest growing cities, Atlanta is the business center of the Southeast U.S. and is rapidly becoming a leader for biotechnology innovation.