FDA Commissioner Mark B. McClellan doesn’t approve of Americans buying low-cost prescription drugs from Canada or over the Internet. But he understands what drives them to do so. At the HBS Health Industry Alumni Association’s fourth annual conference in November, McClellan addressed the gap between the high cost of developing prescription drugs and patient demand for lower prices. Speaking on “The Politics of Innovation,” McClellan acknowledged that many patients have resorted to buying drugs outside the FDA’s regulatory system. “Until we find solutions that don’t force Americans to make choices between safety and affordability, all of us involved in policy cannot rest,” he told an audience of some two hundred participants gathered in Spangler Auditorium.

Massachusetts Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly took an opposing view, characterizing the phenomenon of U.S. citizens crossing into Canada for prescription drugs as a form of civil disobedience. This kind of grassroots response is an important preliminary step toward addressing the rising costs of medicine, he said. Other speakers included Raytheon Chairman Daniel P. Burnham (now retired), speaking on corporate America’s response to escalating health-care costs, and HBS professor Debora L. Spar on the market realities of adoption and in vitro fertilization (see “The Business of Babies”).

For more information about the HBS Health Industry Alumni Association, visit www.hbshealth.com. For additional reports, visit the HBS Conference Coverage on the Working Knowledge website.

European Business Conference Seeks to Understand Differences

Americans expect to find luxury goods at the mall. Europeans don’t. American shoppers expect to be waited on. U.K. customers might consider such attention annoying. Understanding the differences between consumers in the United States and Europe was just one of the topics covered at the fourth annual European Business Conference, presented November 21 and 22 by students of the HBS European Club.

Other panels considered the particular challenges facing entrepreneurs in Europe, the slowdown of wireless technology, and the increasingly bright outlook for venture capital and private equity. Global private equity funding has been on the order of $300 billion since the beginning of 2000, with over 60 percent of that investment occurring in Europe, observed Edward J. DeNor, executive director of Goldman Sachs’ Principal Investment Area, based in London. “People are waking up,” he said. “The number of large deals done in Europe has increased steadily. Capital is going to opportunities that exist uniquely in Europe — not the United States.”

For additional reports, visit the HBS Conference Coverage on the Working Knowledge website.

MBA Program’s Entrepreneurship Activities Cited as National Model

The scope and excellence of Harvard Business School’s MBA activities in entrepreneurship make HBS worthy of emulation by all other business schools. That’s the finding of the United States Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship (USASBE), an organization devoted to entrepreneurship education and research. The USASBE named HBS the winner of its National Model MBA Program award at its annual conference in Dallas in January.

“The judges were impressed with the breadth and depth of our entrepreneurship program,” explained HBS senior lecturer Michael J. Roberts, executive director of the School’s Arthur Rock Center for Entrepreneurship. Roberts noted that there are 31 faculty members in the Entrepreneurial Management unit (and 30 in other units whose work is directly related to entrepreneurship) and that in addition to the required first-year course, The Entrepreneurial Manager, the School offers nearly twenty elective courses in entrepreneurship.

Said Roberts, “The judges appreciated that our approach to entrepreneurship — as an opportunity-focused orientation to general management that is applicable in all situations — speaks to all students regardless of their near-term aspirations. The judges were also interested to see how entrepreneurship was integrated into some other key HBS initiatives, including social enterprise, technology, and innovation.”

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