The employment effects of the acquisition of Indian entrepreneurial firms – a mixed methods study

Despite the growing number of acquisitions of entrepreneurial firms, the evidence of employment change resulting from such acquisitions remains ambiguous. Researchers have primarily relied on econometric models, large datasets of public companies and firm-level characteristics to examine post-acquisition employment change. This thesis seeks to extend the knowledge of acquisition induced employment change in a sample of Indian entrepreneurial firms using a mixed-method approach. It uses a systematic review to identify the gaps in the acquisition literature, followed by a matched-pair regression analysis to examine the short-term employment effects on the acquired firm. In addition, it uses a multiple case study method to investigate the firm and individual level issues that lead to post-acquisition turnover, especially in the top management team. The study makes four contributions to the field of entrepreneurship. Firstly, the systematic literature review highlights the complexity and ambiguity of the empirical evidence on acquisition induced employment change and the lack of coverage of entrepreneurial firms in the literature. Secondly, using quarterly employment data from a novel proprietary database of Indian entrepreneurial firms, the study finds that acquisitions do not lead to short-term employment loss in the acquired entrepreneurial firms vis-à-vis their non-acquired counterparts. Instead, it finds that financial, and related acquisitions lead to short-term employment growth in the acquired firms. Thirdly, the case findings highlight the importance of the integration and human capital strategy in mitigating the post-acquisition employee turnover risk. The findings reinforce the centrality of the top management team in the acquisition of entrepreneurial firms and underline their retention as a necessary precursor to acquisition success. The study also extends the voluntary turnover model by highlighting the issues that lead to the turnover of the top management team in entrepreneurial firms. Finally, through a three-stage framework, the study underlines the importance of temporality in post-acquisition employment change

The good, the bad, and the ugly of ‘Startup India' - a review of India’s entrepreneurship policy

Promoting high-tech entrepreneurship is widely accepted as a catalyst for economic growth, but outside of developed countries, there has been little independent assessment of these policies. Using a comprehensive set of data sources, we provide the first assessment of the “Startup India” programme launched in 2016. We find that Startup India has had a positive impact in reducing regional entrepreneurial disparities but has been less successful in providing financial support through its fund of funds for startups. Furthermore, the policy has failed to recognise and address the under-representation of marginalised caste groups and women entrepreneurs in the Indian start-up ecosystem

Carnegie Mellon Team Tartan: Mission-level Robustness with Rapidly Deployed Autonomous Aerial Vehicles in the MBZIRC 2020

For robotics systems to be used in high risk, real-world situations, they have to be quickly deployable and robust to environmental changes, under-performing hardware, and mission subtask failures. Robots are often designed to consider a single sequence of mission events, with complex algorithms lowering individual subtask failure rates under some critical constraints. Our approach is to leverage common techniques in vision and control and encode robustness into mission structure through outcome monitoring and recovery strategies, aided by a system infrastructure that allows for quick mission deployments under tight time constraints and no central communication. We also detail lessons in rapid field robotics development and testing. Systems were developed and evaluated through real-robot experiments at an outdoor test site in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, as well as in the 2020 Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotics Challenge. All competition trials were completed in fully autonomous mode without RTK-GPS. Our system led to 4th place in Challenge 2 and 7th place in the Grand Challenge, and achievements like popping five balloons (Challenge 1), successfully picking and placing a block (Challenge 2), and dispensing the most water autonomously with a UAV of all teams onto an outdoor, real fire (Challenge 3).Comment: 28 pages, 26 figures. To appear in Field Robotics, Special Issues on MBZIRC 202

Burden of disease scenarios for 204 countries and territories, 2022–2050: a forecasting analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2021

Background: Future trends in disease burden and drivers of health are of great interest to policy makers and the public at large. This information can be used for policy and long-term health investment, planning, and prioritisation. We have expanded and improved upon previous forecasts produced as part of the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD) and provide a reference forecast (the most likely future), and alternative scenarios assessing disease burden trajectories if selected sets of risk factors were eliminated from current levels by 2050. Methods: Using forecasts of major drivers of health such as the Socio-demographic Index (SDI; a composite measure of lag-distributed income per capita, mean years of education, and total fertility under 25 years of age) and the full set of risk factor exposures captured by GBD, we provide cause-specific forecasts of mortality, years of life lost (YLLs), years lived with disability (YLDs), and disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs) by age and sex from 2022 to 2050 for 204 countries and territories, 21 GBD regions, seven super-regions, and the world. All analyses were done at the cause-specific level so that only risk factors deemed causal by the GBD comparative risk assessment influenced future trajectories of mortality for each disease. Cause-specific mortality was modelled using mixed-effects models with SDI and time as the main covariates, and the combined impact of causal risk factors as an offset in the model. At the all-cause mortality level, we captured unexplained variation by modelling residuals with an autoregressive integrated moving average model with drift attenuation. These all-cause forecasts constrained the cause-specific forecasts at successively deeper levels of the GBD cause hierarchy using cascading mortality models, thus ensuring a robust estimate of cause-specific mortality. For non-fatal measures (eg, low back pain), incidence and prevalence were forecasted from mixed-effects models with SDI as the main covariate, and YLDs were computed from the resulting prevalence forecasts and average disability weights from GBD. Alternative future scenarios were constructed by replacing appropriate reference trajectories for risk factors with hypothetical trajectories of gradual elimination of risk factor exposure from current levels to 2050. The scenarios were constructed from various sets of risk factors: environmental risks (Safer Environment scenario), risks associated with communicable, maternal, neonatal, and nutritional diseases (CMNNs; Improved Childhood Nutrition and Vaccination scenario), risks associated with major non-communicable diseases (NCDs; Improved Behavioural and Metabolic Risks scenario), and the combined effects of these three scenarios. Using the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways climate scenarios SSP2-4.5 as reference and SSP1-1.9 as an optimistic alternative in the Safer Environment scenario, we accounted for climate change impact on health by using the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change temperature forecasts and published trajectories of ambient air pollution for the same two scenarios. Life expectancy and healthy life expectancy were computed using standard methods. The forecasting framework includes computing the age-sex-specific future population for each location and separately for each scenario. 95% uncertainty intervals (UIs) for each individual future estimate were derived from the 2·5th and 97·5th percentiles of distributions generated from propagating 500 draws through the multistage computational pipeline. Findings: In the reference scenario forecast, global and super-regional life expectancy increased from 2022 to 2050, but improvement was at a slower pace than in the three decades preceding the COVID-19 pandemic (beginning in 2020). Gains in future life expectancy were forecasted to be greatest in super-regions with comparatively low life expectancies (such as sub-Saharan Africa) compared with super-regions with higher life expectancies (such as the high-income super-region), leading to a trend towards convergence in life expectancy across locations between now and 2050. At the super-region level, forecasted healthy life expectancy patterns were similar to those of life expectancies. Forecasts for the reference scenario found that health will improve in the coming decades, with all-cause age-standardised DALY rates decreasing in every GBD super-region. The total DALY burden measured in counts, however, will increase in every super-region, largely a function of population ageing and growth. We also forecasted that both DALY counts and age-standardised DALY rates will continue to shift from CMNNs to NCDs, with the most pronounced shifts occurring in sub-Saharan Africa (60·1% [95% UI 56·8–63·1] of DALYs were from CMNNs in 2022 compared with 35·8% [31·0–45·0] in 2050) and south Asia (31·7% [29·2–34·1] to 15·5% [13·7–17·5]). This shift is reflected in the leading global causes of DALYs, with the top four causes in 2050 being ischaemic heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, compared with 2022, with ischaemic heart disease, neonatal disorders, stroke, and lower respiratory infections at the top. The global proportion of DALYs due to YLDs likewise increased from 33·8% (27·4–40·3) to 41·1% (33·9–48·1) from 2022 to 2050, demonstrating an important shift in overall disease burden towards morbidity and away from premature death. The largest shift of this kind was forecasted for sub-Saharan Africa, from 20·1% (15·6–25·3) of DALYs due to YLDs in 2022 to 35·6% (26·5–43·0) in 2050. In the assessment of alternative future scenarios, the combined effects of the scenarios (Safer Environment, Improved Childhood Nutrition and Vaccination, and Improved Behavioural and Metabolic Risks scenarios) demonstrated an important decrease in the global burden of DALYs in 2050 of 15·4% (13·5–17·5) compared with the reference scenario, with decreases across super-regions ranging from 10·4% (9·7–11·3) in the high-income super-region to 23·9% (20·7–27·3) in north Africa and the Middle East. The Safer Environment scenario had its largest decrease in sub-Saharan Africa (5·2% [3·5–6·8]), the Improved Behavioural and Metabolic Risks scenario in north Africa and the Middle East (23·2% [20·2–26·5]), and the Improved Nutrition and Vaccination scenario in sub-Saharan Africa (2·0% [–0·6 to 3·6]). Interpretation: Globally, life expectancy and age-standardised disease burden were forecasted to improve between 2022 and 2050, with the majority of the burden continuing to shift from CMNNs to NCDs. That said, continued progress on reducing the CMNN disease burden will be dependent on maintaining investment in and policy emphasis on CMNN disease prevention and treatment. Mostly due to growth and ageing of populations, the number of deaths and DALYs due to all causes combined will generally increase. By constructing alternative future scenarios wherein certain risk exposures are eliminated by 2050, we have shown that opportunities exist to substantially improve health outcomes in the future through concerted efforts to prevent exposure to well established risk factors and to expand access to key health interventions

Mapping the start-up ecosystem in India

This article examines the major trends in the Indian startup ecosystem based on three key parameters: new venture creation & fundraising, characteristics of the founding teams, and modes of entrepreneurial exit, especially exit via acquisitions, over the past decade (2010-2020) by collating data from leading databases and industry reports. The data sources used in this study are Tracxn, Crunchbase, and Global Entrepreneurship Monitor. Four key findings emerge from the analysis: First, despite dedicated policy interventions, the startup activity in India remains concentrated in three prominent clusters-Delhi NCR, Bengaluru, and Mumbai. Second, the data suggest that the startups outside these clusters create disproportionately more jobs visa -vis their share in the total entrepreneurial activity. Third, a handful of universities dominate the founder pool, and women entrepreneurs remain severely underrepresented in the founding teams. Finally, acquisitions are a popular exit route for Indian startups, with a higher proportion of acquired startups coming from outside the three prominent clusters. This article recommends increased targeted policy support towards female founders and entrepreneurial activity outside the three clusters

Ninth International Conference on Wireless Communication and Sensor Networks

Wireless communication and sensor networks would form the backbone to create pervasive and ubiquitous environments that would have profound influence on the society and thus are important to the society. The wireless communication technologies and wireless sensor networks would encompass a wide range of domains such as HW devices such as motes, sensors and associated instrumentation, actuators, transmitters, receivers, antennas, etc., sensor network aspects such as topologies, routing algorithms, integration of heterogeneous network elements and topologies, designing RF devices and systems for energy efficiency and reliability etc. These sensor networks would provide opportunity to continuously and in a distributed manner monitor the environment and generate the necessary warnings and actions. However most of the developments have been demonstrated only in controlled and laboratory environments. So we are yet to see those powerful, ubiquitous applications for the benefit of the society. The conference and consequentially the proceedings would provide opportunity to the researchers to interact with other researchers and share their researches covering all the above areas. The proceedings of the conference thus covers the research work of different authors in the area of wireless sensor networks, wireless communications, devices, tools and techniques for WSN, and applications of wireless sensor networks. This book is beneficial for those researchers who are working in the area of wireless sensor networks, wireless communication, and developing applications of Wireless sensor networks

Proceedings of Ninth International Conference on Wireless Communication and Sensor NetworksWCSN 2013 /

XV, 266 p. 135 illus.online resource