The Secret of Outlier Ventures : Developing Interpretive Capacity to Scale Up

A growing body of research seeks to understand why and how some ventures scale up while others do not. Ventures that succeed in scaling are outliers in the entrepreneurial ecosystem, recognized for adopting distinctive strategies to achieve exceptional growth. While emerging accounts suggest that scaling requires managing knowledge and synchronizing organizational development with growth, prior literature has paid limited attention to how outlier ventures create and mobilize knowledge, and how this process shapes their ability to scale. This study draws on a multiple-case study of three scaleups to show that scaling is rooted in the development of interpretive capacity: the process of attributing meaning to ambiguous or fragmented external information and spreading it across the organization to inform decision-making and guide action. We identify scoping, interpretive, and enabling practices that support the development of interpretive capacity in scaling ventures. Building on these findings, we respond to recent calls for theory on scaling and outliers, and extend the organizational learning literature to the context of new venture scaling. We also offer actionable implications for entrepreneurs, educators, and policymakers by illustrating how interpretive capacity can be purposefully developed through organizational practices

Using an innovative Catchment Nutrient Balancing (CNB) approach to improve river water quality : A case study from rural sub catchment in Cumbria, United Kingdom

Nutrient pollution in river catchments is of significant concern in the UK, particularly from excessive phosphorus, and meeting water quality objectives requires addressing multiple sources of pollution. This study aimed at piloting a Catchment Nutrient Balancing (CNB) approach in the Calthwaite Beck rural catchment, to achieve the local water company's Water Framework Directive (WFD) objectives for phosphorus reduction. CNB is an innovative flexible permitting approach, enabling water companies to reduce loads associated with their wastewater treatment works (WwTW), by working with other sectors to integrate WwTW and catchment solutions. This approach balances phosphorus load reductions across these solutions to achieve regulatory requirements and wider benefits. It promotes collaboration, innovation and systems-thinking, by encouraging water companies to collaborate with various stakeholders to integrate solutions, develop new technologies, and adopt holistic rather than siloed, approaches. This study was the first example in the UK, and is still one of the few, using CNB to meet regulatory phosphorus targets. It involved combining innovative treatment (Polonite®) at Calthwaite WwTW with farming interventions in the catchment to reduce phosphorus. The study successfully demonstrated the effectiveness of an integrated approach at achieving water quality objectives: over a three-year period, phosphorus reduction levels in the catchment achieved an annual average of over 65 %, surpassing the 9 % annual reduction target, with Calthwaite Beck's ecological status improving from “poor” to “moderate”. The findings highlight the importance of collaborative engagement, particularly with regulators, farmers and catchment partners, to improve water quality and deliver wider benefits

Intrinsic and extrinsic drivers of spatio-temporal dynamics in Lepidoptera, and their implications for forecasting for better management strategies.

Mobility is inherent to all organisms and serves as a mechanism for finding resources, mates, or better environmental conditions. Winged insects, in particular Lepidoptera, tend to have higher mobility than other insects partly due to their morphology, and their diversity. However, there are many factors (intraspecific, interspecific, and abiotic) that can affect their ability to disperse or migrate and determine their spatio-temporal movement patterns. Identifying these factors and patterns can help improve prediction and forecasting, especially because climate change, habitat fragmentation and anthropogenic dispersal can alter the distribution and dispersal of these species. In the second chapter of this thesis, intraspecific factors of highly mobile lepidoptera are explored, and findings confirm there are morphological differences between not only sedentary and highly mobile species, but also between species with different mobility behaviours like dispersal and migration, all linked to phylogeny. In chapters 3, 4, and 5, the African armyworm (AAW), a highly mobile maize pest, is used as a case study to explore how different abiotic factors influence its mobility and determine its spatio-temporal dynamics in Tanzania, in order to refine outbreak prediction and management strategies. Findings confirm a non-linear relationship between AAW migratory behaviour, and rainfall and wind, and also distinguish differences during the seasonal patterns (Chapter 3). Long-term trends indicate that the decline in AAW outbreaks in recent decades is related to periods of droughts and a decline of yearly precipitation in Tanzania, which could potentially shift the geographic range of the species (Chapter 4). Finally, in Chapter 5, local (Kenya and Tanzania) and global potential environmental suitability models are projected, suggesting areas where the AAW could persist if ever they were introduced there. Additionally, I present three potential future environmental suitability scenarios that are projected for Kenya and Tanzania, which could serve as models for setting preventive measures in areas of concern

The evolving approach to the assessment of the local socio-economic impacts of major energy projects – with particular reference to UK new nuclear and offshore wind projects

Socio-economic impacts are the ‘people impacts’ of development actions/projects. Socio-economic impact assessment (SEIA) seeks to identify and assess such impacts in project planning and decision-making. The focus of this research is primarily on the impacts of building major energy projects in the UK. A secure energy supply is vital for the functioning of society, yet the construction and operation of new energy facilities can be controversial, especially for the host locality. The aim of the research programme has been to research, document, analyse and advance the assessment of the socio-economic impacts of large and very large UK energy projects, especially on their local and regional host areas. The more detailed objectives were to advance the profile of socio-economic impacts and their assessment in the environmental impact assessment (EIA) process; develop SEIA process and methodology; examine the roles and changing relationships among stakeholders in the process; and particularly to assess the effectiveness of SEIA, learning from experience and follow-up (monitoring and auditing of impacts). Fourteen publications are submitted as part of the PhD by Published Work, including four book chapters especially on SEIA evolution, methodology and follow-up, and ten journal articles covering the scope of socio-economic impacts, SEIA methods, major project monitoring and auditing studies and community benefits agreements. The report begins with an introduction including the origins of the research, followed by a section setting out the researcher’s overall research programme, objectives and methodologies employed. The core sections of the report then examine in greater depth the main themes of the research and the original contributions to knowledge represented by the works, especially relating to the case studies of UK new nuclear power stations and offshore wind farms. They review the researcher’s work on advancing the socio-economic impacts of major energy projects and their assessment in the context of EIA and contributions to the evolving SEIA process and methodologies. The case studies examine key participants involved in the process and the role of community benefits agreements, and especially the importance of follow–up (monitoring and auditing) and adaptive assessment and management. The final section draws some overall conclusions on the development of SEIA in light of the documented research, summarises the original contributions to knowledge, influence on policy and practice, and proposes some future research directions for this field. Contributions include documentation of the need for SEIA, developments in process and methods, coverage of the emerging community benefits approaches, and especially of the importance of follow-up and learning from experience. Examples of future research directions include covering impacts over the full life cycle (including decommissioning), assessing impacts of emerging energy technologies such as small modular reactors and floating wind farms, cumulative socio-economic impacts assessment, comparative community benefits approaches, and approaches to the more effective resourcing of the essential impact monitoring and auditing activities

Implications of the dissemination of healthy lifestyle advice for Afghan adults without histories of hypertension diagnosis or treatment

Objectives: This study explored the relationship between receiving healthy lifestyle advice from healthcare providers and hypertension among undiagnosed individuals in Afghanistan, defined as adults with no previous hypertension diagnosis or treatment history. Materials and Methods: Data were extracted from the 2018–19 Afghanistan National Non-Communicable Diseases Risk Factors Survey, comprising 2,838 participants. Outcomes included hypertension (systolic blood pressure ≥130 mmHg or diastolic blood pressure ≥80 mmHg) and elevated blood pressure (systolic blood pressure 120–129 mmHg and diastolic blood pressure <80 mmHg). Bivariate and multivariable multinomial logistic regression analyses were conducted to assess associated factors. Results: Among the 2,838 participants, 1,344 (47.4%) had hypertension and 344 (12.1%) had elevated blood pressure. Most participants were aged <40 years (63.8%), male (55.8%), and ever-married (80.2%). Multivariable analysis revealed that not receiving healthy lifestyle advice was significantly associated with hypertension (adjusted relative risk ratio [aRRR]=1.24; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.04–1.47) and elevated blood pressure (aRRR=1.40; 95% CI: 1.08–1.81). Sociodemographic and behavioral factors such as age, sex, marital status, education, occupation, fruit consumption, physical activity, and excess weight were significantly associated with hypertension, whereas only sex and excess weight were significantly associated with elevated blood pressure. Conclusion: Our findings underscore the association between receiving healthy lifestyle advice from healthcare providers and a lower prevalence of hypertension among undiagnosed Afghan adults. Accordingly, healthcare providers should recommend lifestyle changes to help manage hypertension among adults

An Analysis of Transformations in West Lancashire's Economy and Society c1660-1740, Principally Sourced from Probate Records.

This thesis presents an investigation into economic and social changes which were evolving in the west of Lancashire during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The agriculturally productive sub-region of the Lancashire plains, which lie to the north and south of the estuary of the river Ribble have formerly been somewhat under-represented in regional historiographies. Discussions have tended to focus either on the latter decades of the eighteenth century and/or the economic transformation of Manchester and its neighbouring towns in the centre and east. However, on the western plains the traditionally husbanded landscape of spatially integrated small ports and rural market towns had also been evolving its own gradual metamorphosis from which economic activities accelerated in the second half of the 1600s. In the following chapters, I have evaluated the compass of this evolution, principally through quantitative analyses of the livestock, crops, goods and activities evinced from male probate inventories. These have been selected as whole sets of extant records from six adjoining townships north and sixteen townships south of the river Ribble, with inventories from Ormskirk and Liverpool similarly transcribed and represented. The principal focus falls upon the decades between c.1660-1740, although the period south of the Ribble prior to the midcentury is referenced also. The inventories have been drawn from the depository of probate bundles held at Lancashire Archives. This resource, which otherwise remains largely untapped, contains inventories, wills, and administrators’ accounts. Analysis of these documents has been supplemented in the text by additional contemporaneous material in the form of diaries, ships’ provisioning ledgers and early town surveys. Each of these primary sources indicate that industrious and commercially focussed economic activities were evolving in rural townships in the seventeenth century to a greater extent than has formerly been acknowledged. This thesis demonstrates that the impetus for these transformative economic effects were founded upon a sound agrarian base during an extended period of relative economic buoyancy which, when coupled with the commercial opportunities occasioned by the inexorable rise of Liverpool from c.1670s onwards enabled even relatively small rural producers to thrive. Occasioned by the combined dynamics of agrarian rationalisation, trades specialisations, technological progress and the importation of novel goods and commodities through Liverpool, a consumer culture rapidly emerged. Analysis of whole sets of probate documents has provided opportunities for contextualisation with earlier regional discussions and facilitates engagement with more recent analyses concerning trades specialisations, the nature of rural industrialisation and urban integration. The temporal span also represents the core of an extended period of irreversible transformation, one which immediately preceded the rapid acceleration of industrialisation and urbanisation, which from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, occasioned economic and population expansion in towns across Lancashire. Therefore, evidence is presented herein which suggests that a sub-regional dynamism prevailed and evolved here in the early phases of the pre-industrial dawn. Such evidence suggests that revisions may need to be considered to established texts and that our inherited perceptions of the west of Lancashire during the early modern period require reorientation. Therefore, the activities and motivations of men and women during these decades of transition, before the factories and mills of Lancashire had been built is deserving of renewed analysis

More than the Sum of Their Words : Generating and Contrasting Large Linguistic Networks

“You shall know a word by the company it keeps” (Firth, 1957), and, as this thesis attempts to demonstrate, also by how the company is kept. The primary motivation of this thesis is establishing a connection of current psycholinguistic evidence, i.e. experimental and theoretical findings regarding the structural design of the mental lexicon, to empirical findings from large-scale corpus-based collocation networks. One contribution of this work therefore lies in the triangulation (Noble & Heale, 2019, p. 67) of corpus linguistics, psycholinguistics and graph theory: bridging gaps between these approaches to language and developing new viewpoints on the data might help overcome or seriously limit fundamental biases and present a more well-founded manner of interpreting results from collocation analyses with regards to their capabilities of portraying mental processes and acting as a proxy for how readers/speakers perceive certain concepts. In order to address the existing research gap, a large-scale analysis of computationally generated corpus-based collocation networks based on the BNC 2014 and psycholinguistic word association networks based on the word association database SWOW-UK is carried out here. Word associations have been chosen as the basis for the psycholinguistic network since they portray the perceived relation between concepts via discrete linguistic units (Kang, 2018, p. 87), similarly to collocations. From the theoretical perspective, in addition to new insights into current open questions regarding the structure and organisation of collocational knowledge, this approach also provides new research prompts for investigating the internal structure of the mental lexicon (ML) further. Another key contribution of this thesis is the development of a full pipeline for large scale collocation network generation that can be used by other researchers, including a thorough explanation of graph theoretical concepts to a linguistic audience paired with an in-depth analysis of the suitability of existing approaches to Association Measure calculation to ascribe the identified collocations a perceptual reality. The findings reveal that combinations of association measures (corpus linguistic approach), particularly log Dice, LL, and χ2, provide the best approximation of word association networks (psycholinguistic evidence), though systematic discrepancies remain. Additionally, word association networks are more tightly knit and generally strongly connected when compared to the more specialised and fragmented nature of collocation networks

Hearing loss as a risk factor for dementia : a systematic review and meta-analysis from a global perspective

Objectives: Hearing loss is a risk factor for dementia with estimated hazard ratios (HRs) of 1.28–2.39. However, whether intercontinental variability exists in this relationship remains unexplored. Method: MEDLINE, PsychInfo, Academic Search Ultimate, Web of Science, and EMBASE were searched, from inception to 2024, for cohort studies of dementia-free individuals with baseline hearing assessments ≥2-year follow-up, and incident dementia outcomes. Random-effect and multilevel models with subgroup difference tests were conducted. Results: Forty-nine studies analysed cohorts from North America (n = 20), Europe (n = 20), Asia (n = 7), and Oceania (n = 2). Binary hearing loss was associated with increased dementia risk (HR = 1.32 [95% CI: 1.23–1.41]) with HRs being largest for Oceania and smallest for Asia (p <0.001). In a sensitivity analysis excluding Oceania, HRs did not differ significantly by continent. Imprecise estimates create uncertainty around whether mild (HR = 1.35 [95% CI: 0.86–2.11]), moderate (HR = 1.39 [95% CI: 0.57–3.35]) or severe (HR = 1.66 [95% CI: 0.59–4.64]) hearing loss are associated with increased dementia risk, with little evidence that HRs by severity differ by continent (p = 0.059). Conclusion: Findings indicate that the association between hearing loss and dementia is consistent globally, though HRs may vary slightly by continent. Registration: This review was pre-registered on PROSPERO (CRD42024545209) and the OSF (https://osf.io/kew29/)

Iso-electronic Sb impurities in GaAs studied by cross-sectional scanning tunneling microscopy

Highly mismatched III/V alloys, such as GaAsN and GaAsSb, are known to suffer from segregation and clustering effects, which often limit their application in devices. In this cross-sectional scanning tunneling microscopy (X-STM) study, we explore the atomic-scale behavior of iso-electronic Sb doping atoms in MBE-grown dilute GaAs1-xSbx (0.01 < x < 0.03). We found that Sb atoms up to four layers below the cleavage surface can be identified in filled-state X-STM images. They appear with diverse anisotropic contrasts, depending on the depth of the Sb atom. These features are classified and are related to their depth below the cleavage surface through careful symmetry considerations. We show that the depth-dependent contrast of Sb atoms in filled-state imaging is determined by both topographic effects (lattice deformation due to the large Sb atom) and electronic effects (resonances of Sb atoms in the valence band). This study shows that in MBE-grown GaAsSb alloys, the Sb atoms can be rapidly incorporated, in which case the GaAsSb layers suffer little from segregation and sharp interfaces can be obtained. Additionally, short-range ordering of Sb, which can be uniquely studied by X-STM, has been analyzed in terms of nearest-neighbor-pair formation, and we find that in MBE-grown GaAsSb materials, a tendency to form Sb pairs or clusters can be suppressed. This opens the route to create high-quality devices based on the highly mismatched GaAsSb alloy