Which Strategy Maximizes the Innovation Output of Firms in China: Using a Control or an Entrepreneurial Sphere?

Innovation is a key stimulus for firms’ survival and growth. However, many of Chinese firms fail to make it due to the lack of adequate financial resources. Previous studies have been deeply investigated the relationships between financial resources and firms’ innovation performance. This paper extends such stream of the literature by focusing on a vital question for entrepreneurs: how to maximize innovation output under resource constraints. Based on an extensive dataset collected at Zhongguancun Science Park (ZSP), Beijing, China, over the period 2011-2014, this paper discusses whether entrepreneurs should pursue extra public funding (control sphere). Besides, this paper also provides empirical evidence for entrepreneurs to make proper choices about resource allocation (entrepreneurial sphere). This paper hypothesizes that enterprises allocating resources by using the entrepreneurial sphere, rather than the control sphere, can advance innovation output. To test our hypothesis, this paper adopts a dynamic panel model estimated by a bootstrap-based bias correction procedure. We find that, in advancing innovative performance, the entrepreneurial sphere is more effective than control. Indeed, at the overall level, the crowding out effect merely offsets the additionality effect when enterprises pursue extra public funding. Therefore, the control sphere does not play an essential role in advancing innovation performance. Thus, extra efforts in that direction will turn out to be in vain. Consequently, as a policy implication we claim that entrepreneurs should spend more time and energy on productive activities rather than lobbying and rent-seeking. In addition, managers should allocate resources properly for internal knowledge creation, external knowledge absorption and S&T activities

On the low energy brane/anti-brane dynamics

We study the dynamical behavior of a pair of Dp-brane and anti Dp-brane ($0 \leq p \leq 6$) moving parallel to each other in the region where the brane and anti-brane annihilation will not occur and the low energy description is valid. Given this, we perform a general analysis, in the center of mass frame, of the behavior of the effective potential with respect to the relative brane separation and find that the classical orbits of this system are in general unbound except for $p = 6$ case for which classical bound orbits exist. The non-linearity of the low energy DBI action for D-brane is important for the underlying dynamics. We solve also the explicit orbits for $p = 6$ case.Comment: 15 pages, 2 figures; shorten version published in Phys. Lett

Measurement and models accounting for cell death capture hidden variation in compound response.

Cancer cell sensitivity or resistance is almost universally quantified through a direct or surrogate measure of cell number. However, compound responses can occur through many distinct phenotypic outcomes, including changes in cell growth, apoptosis, and non-apoptotic cell death. These outcomes have divergent effects on the tumor microenvironment, immune response, and resistance mechanisms. Here, we show that quantifying cell viability alone is insufficient to distinguish between these compound responses. Using an alternative assay and drug-response analysis amenable to high-throughput measurement, we find that compounds with identical viability outcomes can have very different effects on cell growth and death. Moreover, additive compound pairs with distinct growth/death effects can appear synergistic when only assessed by viability. Overall, these results demonstrate an approach to incorporating measurements of cell death when characterizing a pharmacologic response