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Tech investors can’t get enough of Europe’s fizzing startup scene

A continent learns to hustle. After a long slumber, Europe’s animal spirits are stirring The idea of a Europe hostile to entrepreneurs would once have seemed laughable. At its 17th-century peak the Dutch East India Company’s appetite for capital was so voracious that it demanded the invention of the public stockmarket. Investors then did not…

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Stuck in place

The Democrats’ social-spending package cannot repair the American Dream; Social mobility has dropped precipitously In the 1940s Joseph Biden senior fell from early wealth to near-destitution. He moved his young family in with his in-laws as he scrabbled for work in Scranton, Pennsylvania, before re-establishing middle-class ease as a used-car salesman in Delaware. For all the…

Harvard Business Review

Clusters and the New Economics of Competition

by Michael E. Porter From the Magazine (November-December 1998) Now that companies can source capital, goods, information, and technology from around the world, often with the click of a mouse, much of the conventional wisdom about how companies and nations compete needs to be overhauled. In theory, more open global markets and faster transportation and communication…

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Why skippers aren’t scuppered

Supply chains are adapting, not failing Much of the time most people do not think about the complex choreography that makes modern shopping possible. You just click and wait—and not too long, mind—for a package or three to arrive on your doorstep. Over the past few months, however, the world’s supply chains have elbowed their…

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Is America Inc getting less dynamic, less global and more monopolistic?

We test three prevailing hypotheses about American business Concerns about the health of American business are many and varied. Chief executives are chastised for their apparent short-termism. Their companies are berated for fetishising shareholders over everyone and everything else. Elon Musk, boss of Tesla, a maker of electric cars, grumbles about a surfeit of business-school…

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How great supply-chain organizations work

When redesigning a supply-chain organization, it’s intuitive to look to successful companies’ design choices. But our research finds that other factors correlate better to bottom-line performance. How do decisions about the design of supply-chain organizations affect the overall performance of a business? We recently analyzed the supply-chain organizations of more than 50 companies in a…