Entrepreneurial discovery and exploitation processes: sequence or symbiosis?

This study examined the effect that temporal order within the entrepreneurial discovery-exploitation process has on the outcomes of venture creation. Consistent with sequential theories of discovery-exploitation, the general flow of venture creation was found to be directed from discovery toward exploitation in a random sample of nascent ventures. However, venture creation attempts which specifically follow this sequence derive poor outcomes. Moreover, simultaneous discovery-exploitation was the most prevalent temporal order observed, and venture attempts that proceed in this manner more likely become operational. These findings suggest that venture creation is a multi-scale phenomenon that is at once directional in time, and simultaneously driven by symbiotically coupled discovery and exploitation

Innovation, human capital and earning distribution: towards a dynamic life-cycle approach

Empirical anomalies in the dynamics of earnings following the emergence of new ICT technologies are not consistent with various re-elaborations of the human capital theory. The first part of the paper reviews critically this literature and highlights an important gap concerning the role of institutional infrastructures for the systematisation and diffusion of new knowledge. The dynamic life-cycle approach elaborated in the second part provides a coherent account of the evidence, and indicates interesting implications for innovation and educational policies.Innovation; Human Capital; Earning Distribution;

Recurrence networks - A novel paradigm for nonlinear time series analysis

This paper presents a new approach for analysing structural properties of time series from complex systems. Starting from the concept of recurrences in phase space, the recurrence matrix of a time series is interpreted as the adjacency matrix of an associated complex network which links different points in time if the evolution of the considered states is very similar. A critical comparison of these recurrence networks with similar existing techniques is presented, revealing strong conceptual benefits of the new approach which can be considered as a unifying framework for transforming time series into complex networks that also includes other methods as special cases. It is demonstrated that there are fundamental relationships between the topological properties of recurrence networks and the statistical properties of the phase space density of the underlying dynamical system. Hence, the network description yields new quantitative characteristics of the dynamical complexity of a time series, which substantially complement existing measures of recurrence quantification analysis

Thermodynamics of DNA packaging inside a viral capsid: the role of DNA intrinsic thickness

We characterize the equilibrium thermodynamics of a thick polymer confined in a spherical region of space. This is used to gain insight into the DNA packaging process. The experimental reference system for the present study is the recent characterization of the loading process of the genome inside the $\phi$29 bacteriophage capsid. Our emphasis is on the modelling of double-stranded DNA as a flexible thick polymer (tube) instead of a beads-and-springs chain. By using finite-size scaling to extrapolate our results to genome lengths appropriate for $\phi$29, we find that the thickness-induced force may account for up to half the one measured experimentally at high packing densities. An analogous agreement is found for the total work that has to be spent in the packaging process. Remarkably, such agreement can be obtained in the absence of any tunable parameters and is a mere consequence of the DNA thickness. Furthermore, we provide a quantitative estimate of how the persistence length of a polymer depends on its thickness. The expression accounts for the significant difference in the persistence lengths of single- and double-stranded DNA (again with the sole input of their respective sections and natural nucleotide/base-pair spacing).Comment: 9 pages, 6 eps figure