Employment Law and Relations

Questions: 1. Conduct an analysis of the companys competitive position for the period 1996 2000 using appropriate frameworks from strategy and entrepreneurship articles.2. Assess the characteristics of the team that identified and created The Medicines Company what was entrepreneurial about the process that they followed to identify the opportunity and then launch the company.3. Consider what Porter alleges about new or emerging industries, or niche sectors within an existing industry. How would you characterize the companys strategy? 4. What are your thoughts about the risks undertaken by the scavenger strategy of Maxwell and his team? How sustainable do you believe this strategy to be? Answers: 1. Strategy and entrepreneurship are the processes of identifying the allocating resources, developing plans and policies and objectives of an organization. The basic strategy developed by Meanwell while founding The Medicines Company in 1996 was the acquisition of the drugs, which were in the last stage of research and development but were undervalued by the companies developing them. After acquisition and completion of the research, the company established the entrepreneurship of the medicines and markets them globally (Drucker, 2014). Later part of 1996 was dedicated to the review of the potential acquisitions. 1997 began with the beginning of the business with Angiomax, an anticoagulation drug acquired from Biogen. 1998 and 1999 marked the acquisition of rights to IS-159 and CTV=-05 respectively. 2000 was dedicated to funding and in August, the company raised a lump amount of $101.4 million. 2. Meanwell and his group of investors in 1996 had the vision of opportunity where other companies noticed failure. Meanwell had the belief that the drug manufacturing companies has the characteristics to overreact to the clinical study results. They abandon the drugs, which are still undergoing research, as the drugs do not meet the clinical expectations of the developers but apparently having therapeutic values. It was more of a rescue process of the under-research drugs by Meanwell and his colleagues (Magretta, 2012). Therefore, they looked for the drugs, which had the prime characteristics of less research time, less capital investment, have higher chances of entering the global market and have the capacity to generate revenue. Therefore, Meanwell spent the period 1996-2000 for the screening of the drugs and fund raising for his company to finally enter the market with Angiomax their lead product. 3. As per Porters five forces analysis, one of the forces is the threats to the new entrants. Since The Medicines Company was a new entrant in the pharmaceutical sector, so Porters analysis can be implemented to analyze its entrepreneurship. As per Porters analysis, the markets with high profits will attract the new investors. This will eventually decrease the profit share of all the firms in the sector. Therefore, the uncontrolled entry has to be reduced by the incumbents of the industry (E Dobbs, 2014). However, this analysis by Porter did not affect the strategy of Meanwell. Since the company was doing a rescue job for the rejected drugs under development, so it was rather profitable for the niche organizations as they were also gaining from the rejected formulations. The company successfully carried on the scavenging process and entered the pharmaceutical market successfully. 4. The strategy undertaken by Dr. Clive Meanwell was more of a scavenger strategy. This was so because he cleared up the labs of the companies involved in product development and collected the rejected drugs for setting up his entrepreneurship. However, this strategy seemed to work quite efficiently, stile several risks and issues were present in it. The issues were the product pricing, product portfolio development and facing the stock markets (Young et al., 2014). The strategy was a sustainable one as it involved the simple theory of making money from drugs, which have been set aside by their developing companies. Proper research and efficient development of these drugs may give back life to them and can be forwarded to the market. However, selection and pricing of the drugs are quite an essential factor in this strategy of entrepreneurship. References: Drucker, P. (2014).Innovation and entrepreneurship. Routledge. Dobbs, M. (2014). Guidelines for applying porter's five forces framework: A set of industry analysis templates.Competitiveness Review,24(1), 32-45. doi:10.1108/CR-06-2013-0059 Magretta, J. (2012). Michael Porter answers managers' FAQs.Strategy Leadership,40(2), 11-15. doi:10.1108/10878571211209305 Young, M. N., Tsai, T., Wang, X., Liu, S., Ahlstrom, D. (2014). Strategy in emerging economies and the theory of the firm.Asia Pacific Journal of Management,31(2), 331-354.