The Looming Challenges of US Competitiveness: Implications for Philadelphia

Michael E. Porter

Interview | 11 Mar 2014

The Looming Challenges of US Competitiveness: Implications for Philadelphia

Abstract

The third installment of the Fox School's Innovation Leadership Speaker Series featured Professor Michael E. Porter, William Lawrence University Professor, Harvard Business School. Dr. Porter addressed the factors driving innovation and competitiveness in a given region. He shared his research into the role of regional clusters in job creation, innovation, and entrepreneurship. He also provided tools to help practitioners and policymakers create successful regional strategies, assessing the competitiveness of the Philadelphia region and offer implications for the future. Dr. Mercedes Delgado, Assistant Professor of Strategic Management within the Fox School of Business, is a co-researcher on Dr. Porter’s work on innovation clusters and competitiveness. He is a team member of a research project funded by the U.S. Economic Development Administration on Mapping Regional Innovation Clusters.

Keywords: competitiveness; economic analysis; Economics; Philadelphia;

Language: English

Format: Print

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Citation:

Porter, Michael E. "The Looming Challenges of US Competitiveness: Implications for Philadelphia." Innovation Leadership Speaker Series, Temple University, Fox School of Business, Philadelphia, PA, United States, March 11, 2014.

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In this report, the authors synthesize their views on U.S. competitiveness and unveil the findings of the 2019 HBS surveys on U.S. competitiveness. Specifically, this report—built on the survey findings and eight years of prior research on the competitiveness of the United States—highlights a disturbing pattern: despite a decade of steady economic growth since the Great Recession, America has done remarkably little to address underlying structural weaknesses in the country’s economy and society. The nation has squandered the recovery.

Currently, few health care providers measure and report their patient outcomes, which leads to several problems. Attempts to introduce price transparency without outcomes transparency could trigger a “race to the bottom.” Should Medicare coverage be expanded to non-elderly populations, its much lower reimbursements will create pressure on providers to lower their spending in ways that produce even worse outcomes. Even without Medicare expansion, the lack of systematic outcomes measurement has made the migration from fee-for-service to value-based reimbursements, especially bundled payments, less effective and more difficult to implement. Hidden variation in outcomes prevents providers from learning from others how to produce better outcomes for their patients. We propose that the Congress elected in November 2020 mandate the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to begin requiring outcomes measurement by all providers reimbursed under government Medicare and Medicaid programs.

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The Looming Challenges of US Competitiveness: Implications for Philadelphia

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