21,080 research outputs found

    The role of regional institutional entrepreneurs in the emergence of clusters in nanotechnologies

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    In the case of new technologies like nanotechnology, institutional entrepreneurs appear who have to act at different levels (organizational, regional, national) at the same time. We reconstruct, in some detail, the history of two cases, in Grenoble and in Twente/Netherlands. An intriguing finding is that institutional entrepreneurs build their environment before changing their institution. They first mobilize European support to convince local and national levels before actual cluster building occurs. Only later will there be reactions against any de-institutionalisation caused at the base location. The Dutch case shows another notable finding: when mobilizing support the entrepreneur will have to agree to further conditions, and then ends up in a different situation (a broad national consortium) than originally envisaged (the final cluster involved a collaboration of Twente with two other centres). In general, an institutional entrepreneur attempts to create momentum, and when this is achieved, he has to follow rather than lead it.INSTITUTIONAL ENTREPRENEUR; DEINSTITUTIONALISATION; CLUSTER; LOCATION; EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES; PROMISE; NANOTECHNOLOGY

    Putting Prosody First – Some Practical Solutions to a Perennial Problem: The Innovalangues Project

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    This paper presents some of the difficulties of teaching languages, in particular English, in the context of LSP/LAP2 programmes in French universities. The main focus of this paper will be the importance of prosody, especially in English, as an area where these difficulties may be addressed. We will outline the various solutions that are currently being put into place as part of the Innovalangues project, a six-year international language teaching and research project headed by Université Stendhal (Grenoble 3), France. The project has substantial funding from the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research and its mission is to develop innovative tools and measures to help LSP/LAP learners reach B2 on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFRL). The languages concerned are English, Italian, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese and possibly French as a foreign language. Initially the project will be focusing on the needs of Grenoble’s students, but the objective is to make the tools and resources developed freely available to the wider community. Oral production and reception are at the heart of Innovalangues. We believe, along with many other researchers, that prosody is key to comprehension and to intelligibility (Kjellin 1999a, Kjellin 1999b, Munro and Derwing 2011, Saito 2012), particularly given the important differences between English and French prosody (Delattre 1965; Hirst and Di Cristo 1998; Frost 2011). In this paper, we will present the particular difficulties inherent in teaching English (and other foreign languages) in the context of ESP/EAP3 in French universities and some of the solutions that we are implementing through this project (Picavet et al., 2012; Picavet et al 2013; Picavet and Frost 2014). These include an e-learning platform for which various tools are being developed, teacher training seminars focusing on prosody and the collection of data for research

    Investigating co-innovation in exploratory partnerships: An analytical framework based on design theory

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    Intensive innovation contexts push organizations to search for new partnerships in order to explore value creation opportunities and to access external resources. Recent literature shows that more and more partnerships are established before the object and the terms of the partnership has been determined. In such exploratory partnerships (Segrestin 2006), motivated by the prospect of joint value creation and co-innovation, partners explore and progressively construct a common project and an agreement on the sharing of tasks and outputs. In this work we investigate co-innovation dynamics of exploratory partnerships within the context of MINATEC IDEAs Laboratory® (MIL). MIL comprises several industrial partners from different sectors and a major scientific partner specialized in micro-nanotechnologies. Partners of MIL share resources to explore new project ideas and co-innovation opportunities. A particularity of MIL is that all its industrial partners come from different business sectors. The diversity of agendas, competencies and design strategies exhibited at MIL allow the examination of different dimensions of exploratory partnerships: Are there different configurations of exploratory partnerships? What are the dynamics of exploration? How does the exploratory process converge? An analytical framework based on CK design theory is used in order to examine the dynamics of exploratory partnerships within MIL.co-innovation; exploratory partnership;design theory; design oriented organizations;collective action

    On the stable recovery of the sparsest overcomplete representations in presence of noise

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    Let x be a signal to be sparsely decomposed over a redundant dictionary A, i.e., a sparse coefficient vector s has to be found such that x=As. It is known that this problem is inherently unstable against noise, and to overcome this instability, the authors of [Stable Recovery; Donoho et.al., 2006] have proposed to use an "approximate" decomposition, that is, a decomposition satisfying ||x - A s|| < \delta, rather than satisfying the exact equality x = As. Then, they have shown that if there is a decomposition with ||s||_0 < (1+M^{-1})/2, where M denotes the coherence of the dictionary, this decomposition would be stable against noise. On the other hand, it is known that a sparse decomposition with ||s||_0 < spark(A)/2 is unique. In other words, although a decomposition with ||s||_0 < spark(A)/2 is unique, its stability against noise has been proved only for highly more restrictive decompositions satisfying ||s||_0 < (1+M^{-1})/2, because usually (1+M^{-1})/2 << spark(A)/2. This limitation maybe had not been very important before, because ||s||_0 < (1+M^{-1})/2 is also the bound which guaranties that the sparse decomposition can be found via minimizing the L1 norm, a classic approach for sparse decomposition. However, with the availability of new algorithms for sparse decomposition, namely SL0 and Robust-SL0, it would be important to know whether or not unique sparse decompositions with (1+M^{-1})/2 < ||s||_0 < spark(A)/2 are stable. In this paper, we show that such decompositions are indeed stable. In other words, we extend the stability bound from ||s||_0 < (1+M^{-1})/2 to the whole uniqueness range ||s||_0 < spark(A)/2. In summary, we show that "all unique sparse decompositions are stably recoverable". Moreover, we see that sparser decompositions are "more stable".Comment: Accepted in IEEE Trans on SP on 4 May 2010. (c) 2010 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other work

    Rheology of athermal amorphous solids: Revisiting simplified scenarios and the concept of mechanical noise temperature

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    We study the rheology of amorphous solids in the limit of negligible thermal fluctuations. On the basis of general arguments, the flow curve is shown to result from an interplay between the time scales of the macroscopic driving and the (cascades of) local particle rearrangements. Such rearrangements are known to induce a redistribution of the elastic stress in the system. Although mechanical noise, i.e., the local stress fluctuations arising from this redistribution, is widely believed to activate new particle rearrangements, we provide evidence that casts severe doubt on the analogy with thermal fluctuations: mechanical and thermal fluctuations lead to asymptotically different statistics for barrier crossing. These ideas are illustrated and supported by a simple coarse-grained model whose ingredients are directly connected with the physical processes relevant for the flow.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures + Supp. Ma

    Avoiding Stripe Order: Emergence of the Supercooled Electron Liquid

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    In the absence of disorder, electrons can display glassy behavior through supercooling the liquid state, avoiding the solidification into a charge ordered state. Such supercooled electron liquids are experimentally found in organic θ\theta-MMMM' compounds. We present theoretical results that qualitatively capture the experimental findings. At intermediate temperatures, the conducting state crosses over into a weakly insulating pseudogap phase. The stripe order phase transition is first order, so that the liquid phase is metastable below TsT_s. In the supercooled liquid phase the resistivity increases further and the density of states at the Fermi level is suppressed, indicating kinetic arrest and the formation of a glassy state. Our results are obtained using classical Extended Dynamical Mean Field Theory.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, submitted to the proceedings of "Superstripes 2015", Journal of Superconductivity and Novel Magnetism (2015

    Sources of Resilience in the Computer and Software Industries in France

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    French hardware manufacturers were by and large incapable not only of translating technological advances into industrial products but even of understanding the new opportunities these advances offered. While true up to a point, this approach, focused on the failure of the so-called ''national champion'' policy, is incapable of explaining why French providers of IT services have had considerable success both in their own domestic market and in the wider European market. The argument advanced is that a very active higher education policy and national research strategy has produced a supply of particularly valuable competences which feed the IT sectors. In addition, the previous mission-oriented policies encouraged the development of effective technological districts which now nurture a plethora of small, innovative IT firms.IT industry dynamics; France; high-skilled labour; SMEs
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