Business models help firms to set a right path to create, grow and retain their business value. While previous research shows that business model affects the performance of entrepreneurial firms, ...there is still limited understanding about how likely different business model selections of Internet of Things (IoT) startup firms retain their value and whether the venture capital investment intensity does play any role in the business model’s value retention process. In this study, we suggest that the e-business model selections (i.e. novelty, efficiency, lock-in and complementarity) of an IoT mobile Application (App) may affect its value retention. Based on contingency theory, an organization must match its structure and decisions to its external environments. We propose that the venture capitalist’s involvement may moderate the strength of the relationship between e-business models and an IoT mobile App’s’ value retention. We have collected data from 470 start-ups in China. The results show that efficiency-centred and complementarities-centred e-business models increase while lock-in centred e-business model reduces the IoT mobile App’s value retention. Furthermore, our findings also indicate that the venture capitalist’s involvement does not help all types of e-business model’s value retention. The relationship between novelty centred e-business model and value retention is positively only when venture capital investment intensity is high. In contrast, the relationship between efficiency centred e-business model and value retention is positive only when venture capital investment intensity is low. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed, and some limitations and future research directions are proposed.
Problem solving, a process of seeking, defining, evaluating, and implementing the solutions, is considered a converter that can translate organizational inputs into valuable product and service ...outputs. A key challenge for the product innovation community is to answer questions about how knowledge competence and problem‐solving competence develop and sustain competitive advantage. The objective of this study is to theoretically examine and empirically test an existing assumption that problem‐solving competence is an important variable connecting market knowledge competence with new product performance. New product projects from 396 firms in the high‐technology zones in China were used to test the study's theoretical model. The results first indicate that problem‐solving speed and creativity matter in new product innovation performance by playing mediator roles between market knowledge competence and positional advantage, which in turn sustains superior performance. This new insight suggest that mere generation of market knowledge and having a marketing–research and development (R&D) interface will not affect new product performance unless project members have the ability to use the information and to interact to identify and solve complex problems speedily and creatively. Second, these results suggest that different market knowledge competences (customers, competitors, and interactions between marketing and R&D) have distinct impacts on problem‐solving speed and creativity (positive, negative, or none), which underscore the need to embrace a more fine‐grained notion of market knowledge competence. The results also reveal that the relative importance of some of these relationships depends on the perceived level of turbulence in the environment. First, competitor knowledge competence decreases problem‐solving speed when perceived environmental turbulence is low but enhances problem‐solving speed when perceived turbulence is high. Second, competitor knowledge competence has a positive relationship with new product performance when the environmental turbulence is high but no relationship when the environmental turbulence is low. Third, the positive relationship between problem‐solving speed and product advantage is stronger when the perceived environmental turbulence is high than when it is low, which implies that problem solving is more important for creating product advantage when environmental turbulence is high and change is fast and unpredictable. Fourth, the negative relationship between problem‐solving speed and new product performance is stronger when the perceived environmental turbulence is high than when it is low, which means that problem‐solving speed is more harmful for new product performance when change is fast and unpredictable. And fifth, the positive relationship between product quality and new product performance is stronger when perceived environmental turbulence is low than when it is high, which implies that product quality may more likely lead to new product performance when the environment is stable and changes are easy to predict, analyze, and comprehend.
The marketing literature documents inconsistent results on the link between Market Orientation (MO) and innovation performance. The agency theory suggests that agency problems exist in firms between ...the principal (owner) and the agent (managers). A proper firm ownership structure design may solve the principal-agent problem. In this study, we investigate an understudied research question: whether and how ownership structures may affect the relationship between MO and innovation performance? We posit that firms should align three different dimensions of ownership structures with MO in order to achieve a superior innovation performance. We assembled a unique data set, with 242 publicly-traded companies, by merging three different data sources in an emerging market — China to test our framework. The results support our proposed model, and confirm the moderating role of ownership structures in the relationship between market orientation and firm innovation performance in China. First, all things being equal, non-state-owned firms may achieve a higher level of innovation performance than their state-owned counterparts through their implementation of MO. Second, allowing top managers to have a certain fraction of the firm's ownership stake (called managerial ownership), that can switch risk preference and time preference of top manager's to those of shareholders, may foster the effect of MO on innovation performance. Third, a high ratio of major owners over minor owners (named as ownership concentration), that can empower and motivate shareholders to closely monitor a manager's behavior, may also strengthen the relationship between MO and innovation performance. The Chinese data from a transition economy sheds light on the ownership structure reforms in China, and provides novel new insights to the marketing theory and practice regarding the role of two new additional emerging dimensions of ownership structures — managerial ownership and ownership concentration in the relationship between MO and innovation performance. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed, and several avenues for future research are proposed.
Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) technology has contributed significantly to diverse research areas in biology, from cancer to development. Since scRNA-seq data is high-dimensional, a common ...strategy is to learn low-dimensional latent representations better to understand overall structure in the data. In this work, we build upon scVI, a powerful deep generative model which can learn biologically meaningful latent representations, but which has limited explicit control of batch effects. Rather than prioritizing batch effect removal over conservation of biological variation, or vice versa, our goal is to provide a bird's eye view of the trade-offs between these two conflicting objectives. Specifically, using the well established concept of Pareto front from economics and engineering, we seek to learn the entire trade-off curve between conservation of biological variation and removal of batch effects. A multi-objective optimisation technique known as Pareto multi-task learning (Pareto MTL) is used to obtain the Pareto front between conservation of biological variation and batch effect removal. Our results indicate Pareto MTL can obtain a better Pareto front than the naive scalarization approach typically encountered in the literature. In addition, we propose to measure batch effect by applying a neural-network based estimator called Mutual Information Neural Estimation (MINE) and show benefits over the more standard maximum mean discrepancy measure. The Pareto front between conservation of biological variation and batch effect removal is a valuable tool for researchers in computational biology. Our results demonstrate the efficacy of applying Pareto MTL to estimate the Pareto front in conjunction with applying MINE to measure the batch effect.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Biofouling is the accumulation of organisms on surfaces immersed in water. It is of particular concern to the international shipping industry because it increases fuel costs and presents a ...biosecurity risk by providing a pathway for non-indigenous marine species to establish in new areas. There is growing interest within jurisdictions to strengthen biofouling risk-management regulations, but it is expensive to conduct in-water inspections and assess the collected data to determine the biofouling state of vessel hulls. Machine learning is well suited to tackle the latter challenge, and here we apply deep learning to automate the classification of images from in-water inspections to identify the presence and severity of fouling. We combined several datasets to obtain over 10,000 images collected from in-water surveys which were annotated by a group biofouling experts. We compared the annotations from three experts on a 120-sample subset of these images, and found that they showed 89% agreement (95% CI: 87-92%). Subsequent labelling of the whole dataset by one of these experts achieved similar levels of agreement with this group of experts, which we defined as performing at most 5% worse (p Formula: see text 0.009-0.054). Using these expert labels, we were able to train a deep learning model that also agreed similarly with the group of experts (p Formula: see text 0.001-0.014), demonstrating that automated analysis of biofouling in images is feasible and effective using this method.
Perceived integrity of managers affects employee attitudes. Yet its impact on employee behavior and organizational performance is unknown. Addressing this gap, we examine the eifect of perceived ...integrity in leadership on both subjective firm performance and objective employee productivity. Applying dynamic capabilities theory, we propose that perceived integrity in leadership may not only directly affect the outcome variables but also moderate the effect of the firm's multiple-strategy implementation on outcome variables. We test the hypotheses using multiple informants from a transitional economy with an ineffective legal and incomplete institutional environment, which could seriously challenge the leader's commitment to integrity. As hypothesized, perceived integrity is associated with manager's perception of firm performance directly and objective employee productivity through its moderating role in the firm's implementation process of dual strategies. The results illustrate that perceived integrity in leadership plays as an important driver for employee productivity in dual-strategy and non-strategy firms. We provide detailed discussions about the integrity challenge and call for additional future research on this topic.
Alterations in histones, chromatin-related proteins, and DNA methylation contribute to transcriptional silencing in cancer, but the sequence of these molecular events is not well understood. Here we ...demonstrate that on disruption of estrogen receptor (ER) alpha signaling by small interfering RNA, polycomb repressors and histone deacetylases are recruited to initiate stable repression of the progesterone receptor (PR) gene, a known ERalpha target, in breast cancer cells. The event is accompanied by acquired DNA methylation of the PR promoter, leaving a stable mark that can be inherited by cancer cell progeny. Reestablishing ERalpha signaling alone was not sufficient to reactivate the PR gene; reactivation of the PR gene also requires DNA demethylation. Methylation microarray analysis further showed that progressive DNA methylation occurs in multiple ERalpha targets in breast cancer genomes. The results imply, for the first time, the significance of epigenetic regulation on ERalpha target genes, providing new direction for research in this classical signaling pathway.
Purpose: Aberrant DNA methylation, now recognized as a contributing factor to neoplasia, often shows definitive gene/sequence preferences
unique to specific cancer types. Correspondingly, distinct ...combinations of methylated loci can function as biomarkers for
numerous clinical correlates of ovarian and other cancers.
Experimental Design: We used a microarray approach to identify methylated loci prognostic for reduced progression-free survival (PFS) in advanced
ovarian cancer patients. Two data set classification algorithms, Significance Analysis of Microarray and Prediction Analysis
of Microarray, successfully identified 220 candidate PFS-discriminatory methylated loci. Of those, 112 were found capable
of predicting PFS with 95% accuracy, by Prediction Analysis of Microarray, using an independent set of 40 advanced ovarian
tumors (from 20 short-PFS and 20 long-PFS patients, respectively). Additionally, we showed the use of these predictive loci
using two bioinformatics machine-learning algorithms, Support Vector Machine and Multilayer Perceptron.
Conclusion: In this report, we show that highly prognostic DNA methylation biomarkers can be successfully identified and characterized,
using previously unused, rigorous classifying algorithms. Such ovarian cancer biomarkers represent a promising approach for
the assessment and management of this devastating disease.
We developed a novel microarray system to assess gene expression, DNA methylation, and histone acetylation in parallel, and to dissect the complex hierarchy of epigenetic changes in cancer. An ...integrated microarray panel consisting of 1507 short CpG island tags located at the 5'-end regions (including the first exons) was used to assess effects of epigenetic treatments on a human epithelial ovarian cancer cell line. Treatment with methylation (5-aza-2'-deoxycytidine) or deacetylation (trichostatin A) inhibitors alone resulted in up-regulation of 1.9 or 1.1% of the genes analyzed; however, the combined treatment resulted in synergistic reactivation of more genes (10.4%; P < 0.001 versus either treatment alone). On the basis of either primary or secondary responses to the treatments, genes were identified as methylation-dependent or -independent. Synergistic reactivation of the methylation-dependent genes by 5-aza-2'-deoxycytidine plus trichostatin A revealed a functional interaction between methylated promoters and deacetylated histones. Increased expression of some methylation-independent genes was associated with enhanced histone acetylation, but up-regulation of most of the genes identified using this technology was because of events downstream of the epigenetic cascade. We demonstrate proof of principle for using the triple microarray system in analyzing the dynamic relationship between transcription factors and promoter targets in cancer genomes.
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