This paper merges the literature on green and high-quality entrepreneurship by introducing environmental orientation as an unrecognised characteristic of start-up quality and the three quality ...dimensions innovativeness, growth orientation, and international orientation. Entrepreneurship literature argues that only high-quality start-ups contribute to sustainable development and that a better understanding of what determines the quality of start-ups is required. Empirical research has recently shown that the environmental orientation of start-ups is one such determinant, as it significantly predicts their innovativeness. This paper pursues this novel research avenue on the importance of environmental orientation for start-up quality in two ways. First, this paper evaluates and extends this initial evidence on environmental orientation and innovativeness by examining a three times larger sample, covering additional countries and entrepreneurial stages. Second, this paper also analyses the impact of environmental orientation on the quality dimensions of growth orientation and international orientation. Investigation using Global Entrepreneurship Monitor data on 9650 entrepreneurs from 51 countries revealed that start-ups with a higher environmental orientation are of superior quality regarding their innovativeness, growth expectations, and exports. These results remain robust for start-ups at different entrepreneurial stages, and tests employing different methodological approaches and variable definitions. However, the categorisation into factor-driven, efficiency-driven, and innovation-driven countries showed that greener start-ups are more innovative in countries at all three levels of development, while the relationships with growth orientation and international orientation remained significant for only two of the three categories. The findings of this paper provide a new approach for practitioners to identify the small number of high-quality start-ups and an economic reason warranting intensified efforts to support green start-ups.
Receiving contributions from a large number of people is by no means a new method of financing an activity. Popular examples go back to Pullitzer’s campaign to finance the statue of liberty’s ...pedestal in 1885 and Alexander Pope’s translation of Homer’s Illiad in 1713. With the emergence of the internet and its widespread integration in households it has become possible for fundraisers to reach many more investors. One of the first to harness the power of crowdfunding over the internet was the British rock band Marillion who, in 1996, raised USD 60,000 to finance their tour of the United States using crowdfunding in 1996. Since then, a lot has happened in terms of the number of crowdfunding products, platforms and the amount of money raised. The number of investors engaged in crowdfunding increases, and so too does the number of legislative initiatives and amount of research attention devoted to it.
On 13 April 2021 we established the CLEAR research group at Aalborg University. The group has as its declared mission to undertake the study of legal phenomena in crowdfunding and to communicate relevant, research-based knowledge to actors in the field - investors, entrepreneurs, representatives from crowdfunding platforms, and public authorities.
Collaboration is in the CLEAR group’s DNA. Hence, we asked a number of crowdfunding scholars and practitioners from around the world to provide us with their views on current legal issues pertaining to crowdfunding. We have held talks with numerous crowdfunding enthusiasts and practitioners and in the end, twelve authors decided to join us in our efforts to increase focus on legal research in crowdfunding through the publication of this special issue of Nordic Journal of Commercial Law.
Knowing that the legal aspects of crowdfunding are many, and that crowdfunding and law as a research area is in its infancy, we thought it important to give each author free hands in choosing their topic and perspective in their article. Hence, you will find articles addressing a wide range of issues in crowdfunding in this special issue. I thank all authors for their thought-provoking contributions.
I would also like to mention PhD fellow Cecilie Højvang Christensen, research assistant Stefano Cattelan, student assistant Signe Lyngholm Lindbjerg, and student assistant Anna Risgaard Lindbjerg, and to thank them for their contribution in establishing the CLEAR research group at Aalborg University and their assistance in preparing this special issue of the Nordic Journal of Commercial Law.
Thomas Neumann
Chair of the CLEAR research group on crowdfunding
www.theCLEARproject.dk
The Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite – 2 (ICESat-2) observatory was launched on 15 September 2018 to measure ice sheet and glacier elevation change, sea ice freeboard, and enable the ...determination of the heights of Earth's forests. ICESat-2's laser altimeter, the Advanced Topographic Laser Altimeter System (ATLAS) uses green (532 nm) laser light and single-photon sensitive detection to measure time of flight and subsequently surface height along each of its six beams. In this paper, we describe the major components of ATLAS, including the transmitter, the receiver and the components of the timing system. We present the major components of the ICESat-2 observatory, including the Global Positioning System, star trackers and inertial measurement unit. The ICESat-2 Level 1B data product (ATL02) provides the precise photon round-trip time of flight, among other data. The ICESat-2 Level 2A data product (ATL03) combines the photon times of flight with the observatory position and attitude to determine the geodetic location (i.e. the latitude, longitude and height) of the ground bounce point of photons detected by ATLAS. The ATL03 data product is used by higher-level (Level 3A) surface-specific data products to determine glacier and ice sheet height, sea ice freeboard, vegetation canopy height, ocean surface topography, and inland water body height.
•Describes the ICESat-2 Observatory and its sole instrument: the Advanced Topographic Laser Altimeter System (ATLAS)•Presents the structure and major contents of the ICESat-2 Level 1B data product (ATL02; photon times of flight)•Presents the structure and major contents of the ICESat-2 Level 2A data product (ATL03; Global Geolocated Photons)
Seasonal acceleration of the Greenland Ice Sheet is influenced by the dynamic response of the subglacial hydrologic system to variability in meltwater delivery to the bed via crevasses and moulins ...(vertical conduits connecting supraglacial water to the bed of the ice sheet). As the melt season progresses, the subglacial hydrologic system drains supraglacial meltwater more efficiently, decreasing basal water pressure and moderating the ice velocity response to surface melting. However, limited direct observations of subglacial water pressure mean that the spatiotemporal evolution of the subglacial hydrologic system remains poorly understood. Here we show that ice velocity is well correlated with moulin hydraulic head but is out of phase with that of nearby (0.3-2 kilometres away) boreholes, indicating that moulins connect to an efficient, channelized component of the subglacial hydrologic system, which exerts the primary control on diurnal and multi-day changes in ice velocity. Our simultaneous measurements of moulin and borehole hydraulic head and ice velocity in the Paakitsoq region of western Greenland show that decreasing trends in ice velocity during the latter part of the melt season cannot be explained by changes in the ability of moulin-connected channels to convey supraglacial melt. Instead, these observations suggest that decreasing late-season ice velocity may be caused by changes in connectivity in unchannelized regions of the subglacial hydrologic system. Understanding this spatiotemporal variability in subglacial pressures is increasingly important because melt-season dynamics affect ice velocity beyond the conclusion of the melt season.
NASA’s ICESat-2 mission was launched in September 2018 with the primary goal of monitoring our rapidly changing polar regions. The sole instrument onboard, the Advanced Topographic Laser Altimeter ...System (ATLAS), is now providing routine, very high-resolution, surface elevation data across the globe, including the Arctic and Southern Oceans. In this study we demonstrate our new processing chain for converting the along-track ICESat-2 sea ice freeboard
product (ATL10) into sea ice thickness, focusing our initial efforts on the Arctic Ocean. For this conversion we primarily make use of snow depth and density data from the NASA Eulerian Snow on Sea Ice Model (NESOSIM). The coarse resolution (~100 km) snow data are redistributed onto the high resolution (~30 - 100 m) ATL10 freeboards using relationships obtained from snow depth and freeboard data collected by NASA’s Operation IceBridge mission. We present regional sea ice thickness distributions and highlight their seasonal evolution through our first winter-season of data collection. We include ice thickness uncertainty estimates, while also acknowledging the limitations of these estimates. We generate a gridded monthly thickness product and compare this with various monthly sea ice thickness estimates obtained from ESA’s CryoSat-2 satellite mission, with ICE 33 Sat-2 showing consistently lower thicknesses. Finally, we compare our February/March 2019 thickness estimates to ICESat February/March (19th February – 21st March) 2008 ice thickness estimates using the same input assumptions, which show a ~0.40 m or ~21% thinning across an inner Arctic Ocean domain in this 11-year time period.
The Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2) and its sole scientific instrument, the Advanced Topographic Laser Altimeter System (ATLAS), was launched on 15 September 2018 with a primary ...goal of measuring changes in the surface of the Earth's land ice (glaciers and ice sheets). ATLAS is a photon-counting laser altimeter, which records the transit time of individual photons in order to reconstruct surface height along track. The ground-track pattern repeats every 91 days such that changes in ice sheet surface height can be estimated through time. In this paper, we describe the set of algorithms that have been developed for ICESat-2 to retrieve ice sheet surface height from the geolocated photons for the Land Ice Along-Track Height Product (ATL06), and demonstrate their output and performance using a synthetic dataset over various land-ice surfaces and under different cloud conditions. We show that the ATL06 algorithm is expected to perform at the level required to meet the ICESat-2 science objectives for land ice.
•Describes the ATL06 algorithm for retrieval of land-ice heights from ICESat-2 data•Describes land-ice height bias corrections and the structure of the ATL06 output•Illustrates ATL06 performance for a range of land-ice surfaces and cloud conditions
Penetration of surface meltwater to the bed of the Greenland Ice Sheet each summer causes an initial increase in ice speed due to elevated basal water pressure, followed by slowdown in late summer ...that continues into fall and winter. While this seasonal pattern is commonly explained by an evolution of the subglacial drainage system from an inefficient distributed to efficient channelized configuration, mounting evidence indicates that subglacial channels are unable to explain important aspects of hydrodynamic coupling in late summer and fall. Here we use numerical models of subglacial drainage and ice flow to show that limited, gradual leakage of water and lowering of water pressure in weakly connected regions of the bed can explain the dominant features in late and post melt season ice dynamics. These results suggest that a third weakly connected drainage component should be included in the conceptual model of subglacial hydrology.
NASA's Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite-II (ICESat-2) mission is a decadal survey mission (2016 launch). The mission objectives are to measure land ice elevation, sea ice freeboard, and ...changes in these variables, as well as to collect measurements over vegetation to facilitate canopy height determination. Two innovative components will characterize the ICESat-2 lidar: 1) collection of elevation data by a multibeam system and 2) application of micropulse lidar (photon-counting) technology. A photon-counting altimeter yields clouds of discrete points, resulting from returns of individual photons, and hence new data analysis techniques are required for elevation determination and association of the returned points to reflectors of interest. The objective of this paper is to derive an algorithm that allows detection of ground under dense canopy and identification of ground and canopy levels in simulated ICESat-2 data, based on airborne observations with a Sigma Space micropulse lidar. The mathematical algorithm uses spatial statistical and discrete mathematical concepts, including radial basis functions, density measures, geometrical anisotropy, eigenvectors, and geostatistical classification parameters and hyperparameters. Validation shows that ground and canopy elevation, and hence canopy height, can be expected to be observable with high accuracy by ICESat-2 for all expected beam energies considered for instrument design (93.01%-99.57% correctly selected points for a beam with expected return of 0.93 mean signals per shot (msp), and 72.85%-98.68% for 0.48 msp). The algorithm derived here is generally applicable for elevation determination from photon-counting lidar altimeter data collected over forested areas, land ice, sea ice, and land surfaces, as well as for cloud detection.
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