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The Hidden Value of Abandoned Applications to the Patent System
Get PDFSome inventors abandon their patent applications without ever receiving a patent. Although patent scholars view such abandoned applications as essentially worthless, we question that conventional wisdom. In conducting an empirical analysis of a recently released patent application dataset (in light of a 1999 change requiring publication of most abandoned applications), we find that the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) often uses abandoned applications as prior art when examining future patent applications. Abandoned applications thus generate an administrative disclosure that prevents the issuance of broader patent rights to later applicants. By narrowing the scope of new patents, abandoned applications perform a public service in limiting exclusivity over any given technological space and opening up more invention space to the public domain, but they do so at an enormous private cost to the abandonee—benefits and costs that have yet to be fully accounted for in the literature
Climate-Related Geographical Variation in Performance Traits across the Invasion Front of a Widespread Non-Native Insect
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Invasive species are ideal systems for testing geographical differences in performance traits and measuring evolutionary responses as a species spreads across divergent climates and habitats. The European gypsy moth, Lymantria dispar dispar L. (Lepidoptera: Erebidae), is a generalist forest defoliator introduced to Medford, Massachusetts, USA in 1869. The invasion front extends from Minnesota to North Carolina and the ability of this species to adapt to local climate may contribute to its continuing spread. We evaluated the performance of populations along the climatic gradient of the invasion front to test for a relationship between climate and ecologically important performance traits. Location
Eastern United States of America Taxon
Lymantria dispar dispar L. (Lepidoptera: Erebidae) Methods
Insects from 14 populations across the US invasion front and interior of the invasive range were reared from hatch to adult emergence in six constant temperature treatments. The responses of survival, pupal mass and larval development time were analysed as a function of source climate (annual mean normal temperature), rearing temperature and their interaction using multiple polynomial regression. Results
With the exception of female development time, there were no significant interactions between source climate and rearing temperature, indicating little divergence in the shape of thermal reaction norms among populations. Source population and rearing temperature were significant predictors of survival and pupal mass. Independent of rearing temperature, populations from warmer climates had lower survival than those from colder climates, but attained larger body size despite similar development times. Larval development time was dependent on rearing temperature, but there were not consistent relationships with source climate. Main Conclusions
Thermal adaptation can be an important factor shaping the spread of invasive species, particularly in the context of climate change. Our results suggest that L. d. dispar is highly plastic, but has undergone climate-related adaptation in thermal performance and life-history traits as it spread across North America
The Liability of Disruption
Get PDFResearch summary. We study the internationalization-related legitimacy challenges of firms with disruptive business models by using a case comparison of leading sharing economy companies Airbnb and Uber. We show that they are insulated from many traditional legitimacy challenges to multinationals entering host markets, but exposed to others that have not been noted previously. Specifically, we identify a novel market-entry legitimacy challenge, ‘liability of disruption,’ which manifests as regulatory, incumbent business and societal pushback against firms with disruptive business models. After presenting our cross-case analysis, we theorize about the nature and impacts of these three distinct but interconnected forms of host country institutional pushback on firms’ ability to achieve and maintain legitimacy, and how they are driven by national governance characteristics.
Managerial summary. Sharing economy companies Airbnb and Uber have engaged in rapid processes of global growth, but their practices and right to operate have been challenged by a variety of host country stakeholders. This study shows that their international expansion efforts have been affected by emergent regulatory scrutiny, incumbent businesses’ opposition, and other societal concerns about their impacts on employees, customers, competitors and the communities where they operate. We label these challenges as the ‘liability of disruption’ and illustrate their importance for understanding the internationalization-related complexities faced by sharing economy firms and, more generally, internationalizing ventures with disruptive business models that aim to restructure entire industry sectors
National Culture and International Business: A Path Forward
No full textThe anniversary of Kogut and Singh’s construct of “cultural distance” is a good time to reflect on this immensely popular but flawed construct, assess the efficacy of the remedies offered for its reform and refinement, and chart an alternative approach that represents a departure from distance as the dominant paradigm with which to view and analyze the impact of national culture on cross-border business. The proposed alternative, a contact-based framework shifts attention from what sets cultures apart towards the actual cultural interface that firms and their executives experience when participating in an international transaction. With this lens, the cultural exchange is regarded as an evolving interactional process of engagement, which commences prior to a transaction and proceeds through the life of the inter-party arrangement and beyond, and whose potential to yield negative – or positive – outcome is subject to specific contingencies. Implications for theory, methodology, and practice are delineated
Dynamics of country image: evidence from Malaysia
Get PDFPurpose – Previous research has posited country image to operate at two levels: the country’s macro image, based on general politico-economic descriptors of the country, and the country’s micro image, based on perceptions of products from the country. The purpose of this paper is to further explore this premise in a practical study, using a psychometric assessment of macro and micro country images by ascertaining the nature of differences in macro and micro images of leading exporters, the USA and China, for consumers in Malaysia, a top import destination of US and Chinese goods; the images of Malaysian goods were similarly assessed.
Design/methodology/approach – The study used a systematic sample, with questionnaires distributed to adult respondents using a street intercept. Interviewers asked every other passer-by to fill out a questionnaire, and stood in close proximity to address any questions from respondents. The study hypothesized that there is a significant difference between country macro and micro image, respectively for the USA, China and Malaysia, and that there is significant relationship between country macro image and country micro image in each country, respectively, USA, China and Malaysia.
Findings – The study found support for the reliability of existing country micro and macro image measures, and further refined them for increased validity. The study compared between the countries and found significant differences on both macro and micro dimensions of country image. The US scored highest on technological research, high quality products, standards of living, labor costs, welfare system, industrialization, civilian government, development, literacy, free-market system and democracy, followed by China on technological research, industrialization, development and free-market system, with Malaysia scoring higher on product quality, labor costs, welfare system, civilian government is civilian/non-military, literacy, free-market system and democracy.
Research limitations/implications – A broader study of countries that share geopolitical and cultural similarities might offer additional insights into country macro and micro image.
Practical implications – The study cautions marketers to assess the acceptance of their products in the context of their country’s macro and micro image perceptions in target markets, and steer those perceptions in a manner that would be beneficial to their marketing efforts.
Originality/value – The conceptualization of the macro and micro aspects of country image has been one of the less studied dimensions of country image. This study is the first to address these dimensions from an emerging-market perspective, suggesting that, at the macro level, country perceptions regarding technology, economy, and politics contribute to an overall impression of the country, which would then influence the desirability of its products originating there. For the micro country image, products from countries perceived as innovative, excelling in product design, and producing prestigious products, are likely to be perceived as desirable
The “Right” recipes for security culture: a competing values model perspective
Get PDFThis study argues that the effect of perceived organizational culture on the formation of security-related subjective norms and the level of compliance pressure will vary based on how the employees perceive their organization’s cultural values. These perceptions reflect on the assumptions and principles that organizations use to guide their security-related behaviors. To make these arguments, we adopt the competing values model (CVM), which is a model used to understand the range of organizational values and resulting cultural archetypes
e-Museletter: April 2020
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A Template for Success: Celebrating the Work of Judith Grabiner
Get PDFJudith Grabiner is a mathematician who specializes in the history of mathematics. She is currently the Flora Sanborn Pitzer Professor Emerita of Mathematics at Pitzer College, one of the Claremont Colleges in Claremont, California. She has authored more than forty articles, as well as three books: The Origins of Cauchy’s Rigorous Calculus (1981), The Calculus as Algebra: J.-L. Lagrange, 1736–1813 (1990), and A Historian Looks Back: The Calculus as Algebra and Selected Writings (2010), which won the Beckenbach Prize from the Mathematical Association of America in 2014. She deliv- ered an invited address titled “The Centrality of Mathemat- ics in the History of Western Thought” at the International Congress of Mathematicians (Berkeley) in 1986. She is the only four-time winner—in 1984, 1998, 2005, and 2010— of the Paul R. Halmos–Lester R. Ford Award for articles of expository excellence published in the American Mathemat- ical Monthly.1 She has also received the Carl B. Allendoerfer Award for expository excellence in Mathematics Magazine on three occasions: in 1984, 1988, and 1996. In 2003 she was given the Mathematical Association of America’s Deborah and Franklin Tepper Haimo Award for Distinguished College or University Teaching, and in 2013 she became an inaugural Fellow of the American Mathematical Society. This article explores her professional life and her far- reaching contributions to the mathematical community
The CLAS12 software framework and event reconstruction
No full textWe describe offline event reconstruction for the CEBAF Large Acceptance Spectrometer at 12 GeV (CLAS12), including an overview of the offline reconstruction framework and software tools, a description of the algorithms developed for the individual detector subsystems, and the overall approach for charged and neutral particle identification. We also present the scheme for data processing and the code management procedures
Times of the Multitude and the Antichrist
Get PDFIn Nietzsche’s Europeanism Gary Shapiro discerns key resonances of his “great politics of the Earth” out of which those capable of “re-thinking the direction of the earth” may ultimately deploy a “philosophy of the Antichrist” to realize their vision of the future. In considering how philosophers of the future may create the opportune moment in which to revalue all values in such a new direction, Shapiro accounts for Nietzsche’s rejection of the priestly philosophers’ teleological conception of time. He also explicates Nietzsche’s notion of the multitude (Menge), whose diversity contrasts with the homogenous masses and mitigates against the reactionary state