Nucor Steel and Partner's Healthcare - Term Paper Example

As a function of this, the following analysis will consider and review the means by which Nucor Steel and Partner Health have attempted to leverage increasing returns within their organization as a means to make them more competitive and ultimately more profitable within the markets that they compete. Although it is oftentimes not easy to determine what aspects of a firm are primed for increasing rates of return, the instances that will be discussed in this case study and analysis have been determined from prior research which has been performed with the sole intent of labeling these increasing return mechanisms and seeking to implement them as a way to boost the profitability of the industry in question. Q1) Nucor challenge and principles of increasing returns working to help the firm achieve its strategic goals.

Analyze the cases in terms of network effect, standardization, high switching cost, and learning effect. With regards to Nucor Steel, the case study in question presented a situation in which lower levels of company leadership outright refused to communicate and or learn from the experience of one another. As a function of this compartmentalized approach to management and information sharing, the firm itself was suffering from a lack of free flow of knowledge systems and intelligence transfer.

As a result of this, the profitability and overall level to which the firm could hope to grow was necessarily constrained. As a means of outgrowing this constraint and leveraging increasing returns of the human capital inputs that the process entailed, the authors of the piece detail how they sought to implement a type of incentive system for information sharing within the firm and among leadership positions (Anderson 2009). Naturally, such an approach necessarily sought to change an aspect of the company’s culture.

However, what was particularly intelligent about the means by which this was affected was the fact that rather than merely forcing this change upon the shareholders, it was presented to them by means of an incentive mechanism (Nucor 2012). In this way, the switching cost was alleviated, the network affect (by which shareholders sought to implement the change) was also assisted, and the learning effect was shortened. Such an approach was highly useful and insightful as it helped the firm to rapidly yet methodically implement the new structure and achieve the ultimate affect which was sought after without disrupting the otherwise solid performance that the firm exhibited within the market.

The second article that has been analyzed dealt with the case of Partner Health and their desire to implement a type of EBM (Evidence Based Medicine) into their field of practice. Recognizing that the prime impediment to a higher quality of care and helping the firm to evolve to the next level was the fact that their current system of healthcare provision meant that there was little to no evolution and growth within the body of knowledge that medical practitioners disseminated on a daily basis, the top leadership sought to engage a system of EBM as a means of seeking to provide these affected shareholders with an ever expanding body of clinical knowledge which could help to inform them as to the decision that they should make.

Likewise, with relation to the ultimate implementation of