Disruptive collaboration: a thesis for pro-competitive collaboration in health care

There are strong arguments for more competition in health care to drive significant improvements in the U.S. system. These arguments are sound, as a general rule. However, there are some problems in health care that are so large or complex that to achieve the desired competition, more novel forms of collaboration are also required. One form of collaboration — called disruptive collaboration — involves a large number of incumbent firms collaborating to collectively disrupt an entire subindustry. Such collaboration is scalably facilitated through a new vehicle called the Health Care Utility Model — a novel business model in which incumbent institutions form a self-sustaining, mission-driven corporation to provide essential products and services for customers and society at the lowest sustainable cost. Once formed, these health care utilities act as industry-competition boosters in competitively stagnant markets such as those dominated by hard-to-compete-against oligopolies

Natural Resources Research Institute Technical Report

Minnesota’s National Forest Breeding Bird Monitoring Program has documented trends in forest bird abundances for 24 years. These data have provided insight into the impacts of forest management on breeding birds and helped inform the development of management policies and conservation initiatives. This report summarizes forest bird monitoring data gathered from 1995 through 2018. Here we summarize the current status of species trends and overall trends for migration, habitat, and nesting guilds. We focus our discussion on species of conservation importance in the state to provide an ecological context and discuss management implications of the observed patterns in the region for these species

Power reduces the press of the situation: Implications for creativity, conformity, and dissonance

Although power is often conceptualized as the capacity to influence others, the current research explores whether power psychologically protects people from influence. In contrast to classic social psychological research demonstrating the strength of the situation in directing attitudes, expressions, and intentions, 5 experiments (using experiential primes, semantic primes, and role manipulations of power) demonstrate that the powerful (a) generate creative ideas that are less influenced by salient examples, (b) express attitudes that conform less to the expressed opinions of others, (c) are more influenced by their own social value orientation relative to the reputation of a negotiating opponent, and (d) perceive greater choice in making counterattitudinal statements. This last experiment illustrates that power is not always psychologically liberating; it can create internal conflict, arousing dissonance, and thereby lead to attitude change. Across the experiments, high-power participants were immune to the typical press of situations, with intrapsychic processes having greater sway than situational or interpersonal ones on their creative and attitudinal expressions

From what might have been to what must have been: Counterfactual thinking creates meaning.

Four experiments explored whether 2 uniquely human characteristics—counterfactual thinking (imag-ining alternatives to the past) and the fundamental drive to create meaning in life—are causally related. Rather than implying a random quality to life, the authors hypothesized and found that counterfactual thinking heightens the meaningfulness of key life experiences. Reflecting on alternative pathways to pivotal turning points even produced greater meaning than directly reflecting on the meaning of the event itself. Fate perceptions (“it was meant to be”) and benefit-finding (recognition of positive consequences) were identified as independent causal links between counterfactual thinking and the construction of meaning. Through counterfactual reflection, the upsides to reality are identified, a belief in fate emerges, and ultimately more meaning is derived from important life events