• How Many Doctors Does the Netherlands Need? Ask iThink
• Using iThink to Create, Refine, and Validate Business Plans
• What's New from isee systems?
• Upcoming isee User Conference and Workshops

Egbert Roos

In the Netherlands, higher education is public and subsidized by the government. Students pay tuition, but the rates are modest. The same is true for medical education. You might think that low tuition rates would swell the numbers of Dutch medical students but that’s not the case. There are only 8 medical schools in the country and the government carefully restricts the number of medical students enrolled in each of 36 specialty areas.

That leads to an interesting question – how does the Dutch government know how many doctors the country will need? Until recently, they didn’t. The estimates used weren’t good enough to prevent impacts on quantity/supply of care as was evidenced by a decision in the ‘80’s to close two schools of dentistry. When the schools were closed, an abundance of dentists left many of them unemployed. Unfortunately, a number of years later, dentists were in short supply and one of the schools had to be reopened.

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Dr. Oliver Grasl

Imagine you run a boutique consulting firm and want to build it into a larger business. Increasing profits and expanding the firm requires billing more hours. There are two ways to increase billable hours: sell larger projects that take more time to complete or sell larger project teams. How do you determine which strategy will be most effective?

You could try one option and see how it goes. That’s a big risk; it could fail miserably. In the event that business did increase a bit, you’d never know if the second option, the one you didn’t try, would have worked even better.

Oliver Grasl, Managing Director of transentis, a management consulting agency based in Berlin, Germany, is helping clients create and test business plans that address questions just like this. In fact, one of his clients was the boutique consulting firm trying to find the best way to expand.

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New Products & Software Releases

·  STELLA and iThink Version 9.1.4 ·  isee NetSim 1.1 ·  Tracing Connections: Voices of Systems Thinkers foreword by Jay W. Forrester

Online Training Materials

·  Understanding the Economic Crisis by Dr. Mark Paich ·  Dynamic Dashboards: Practical Tools for Improving Performance ·  Leveraging Systems Thinking for Adaptive Challenges

Recorded Webinars

·  Visualizing Math with STELLA by Diana Fisher and Karim Chichakly ·  Leveraging Social Networks to Communicate & Share Simulations by Jeremy Merritt and Michael Bean

isee systems blog — Making Connections

·  What are “Mental Models”? ·  Developing a Market Using the Bass Diffusion Model ·  Gulf Oil Leak: A Systems Thinking Perspective ·  And more...

Join us in Providence this October. Early registration ends July 15th.   Dates:  October 4-6, 2010 Place:  The Westin Providence Providence, Rhode Island Fee:  $595 thru July 15th $695 July 16th or later	Waterplace Park & Riverwalk, Providence
The isee User Conference is a great opportunity for iThink and STELLA users from business, education, research and consulting to share experiences, learn new skills, and connect with experts. The two and a half days will be filled with keynote addresses by Systems Thinking leaders Henk Akkermans, Diana Fisher, Steve Peterson, Matthias Ruth, and Peter Senge, iThink and STELLA application stories, field-specific round tables, hands-on workshops, poster sessions, and time for networking and open discussion.