Post Catch-up with Market Cultivation and Product Servicizing: Case of Taiwan\u27s Transportation Equipment Industries

This paper sets out to examine a key issue: how a latecomer, like Taiwan may develop its industry in a post catch-up manner. We make intensive inquiries into this issue via case studies on two sectors in Taiwan, namely the bicycle industry and the electric vehicle industry. One challenge to post catch-up is related to the situation where innovation model and path are at the fluid phase and where scarce opportunity for imitation is present. This has led us to giving special account to fuzzy front-end at the industrial level and how market cultivation and innovative business models come to play an important role in shaping the innovation path for post catch-up. For a couple of leading players in Taiwan’s bicycle industry, a key issue they faced was how to transform themselves and local setting in Taiwan to become a leader in high-end bicycles, in an attempt to fend off escalated international competition. In the emerging EV industry, the Taiwanese players try to overcome its structural weaknesses in the mainstream automotive industry to explore the possibility of levelling the playing field with the forerunners in the advanced countries. Our case studies suggest that technological catch-up is not necessarily a prelude to post catch-up, depending on the nature of new innovation trajectory and entry modes of the emerging industry. While the way in which a latecomer’s industry to rise in a post-catch-up manner has something to do with path dependence, something can be done to overcome the path dependence. Our analyses also lend support to the importance of product servicizing as a means of post catch-up, especially from the perspective of market cultivation. On balance, for post catch-up at an industrial level, a latecomer’s innovation system and its boundaries have to be shaped in line with the country’s level of technological accumulation, constituent firm’s strategy, the complexity of the innovation at issue, and the way in which the focal industry is emerging

Lessons Learned from Applications of IoT at Social Spheres

Although Taiwan made its well-respected economic achievements at the catch-up period, the country is in transition to innovation-driven economic upgrading, which is recently being promoted by a strategic policy package of so-called the Industrial Transformation Program, focusing on 5+N innovative industries. Unlike the previous focus on modularized intermediate goods in the industrialization stage, the new policy package calls for innovation with strong flavor of cross-fertilization, solution-orientation, software and hardware integration. A key issue of this paper is how a latecomer like Taiwan may innovate in a post catch-up manner, which requires a latecomer country to establish new technological trajectories for innovation in a changing competitive environment where scarce opportunity for imitation is present. The paper sets out to examine the ways in which how Taiwanese firms approach or harness IoT innovations, especially via applications at the social sphere. It seems to present more challenges than IoT applications inside the firm (for example Industry 4.0) for the reason that IoT applications at social sphere are related to the aspects of behavior and social interfaces of the broadly-defined customer space.As a result, for innovators in Taiwan, they need to address the social interface involved in an appropriate manner. In many cases, they also need compound innovations, especially in conjunction with business models, not just technological innovation alone. Therefore, innovators in Taiwan have to change the way in which they innovate and interact with the changing innovation ecosystems. Especially in the emerging innovative sectors as 5+N innovative industries targeted by the government, the evolving innovation ecosystems are intrinsically international. Based on two intensive case studies, we would like to draw some lessons learned in Taiwan, which may enrich our understanding of factors underlying industrial innovations in the era of the digital economy, especially for latecomer countries in transition

Degree-degree Correlated Low-density Parity-check Codes Over a Binary Erasure Channel

Most existing works on analyzing the performance of a random ensemble of low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes assume that the degree distributions of the two ends of a randomly selected edge are independent. In the paper, we take one step further and consider ensembles of LDPC codes with degree-degree correlations. For this, we propose two methods to construct an ensemble of degree-degree correlated LDPC codes. We then derive a system of density evolution equations for such degree-degree correlated LDPC codes over a binary erasure channel (BEC). By conducting extensive numerical experiments, we show how the degree-degree correlation affects the performance of LDPC codes. Our numerical results show that LDPC codes with negative degree-degree correlation could improve the maximum tolerable erasure probability. Moreover, increasing the negative degree-degree correlation could lead to better unequal error protection (UEP) design.Comment: accepted by the 2023 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT

Community-onset bacteremia in kidney transplant recipients: The recipients fare well in terms of mortality and kidney injury

BackgroundBloodstream infection is not uncommon in kidney transplant recipients (KTRs) and is associated with mortality, graft loss, and increased medical expenses. Whether these septic patients are more vulnerable to serious complications, resistant strains, or worse clinical outcomes than other patient groups in the community-onset settings remains undetermined.MethodsA retrospective study was conducted at a medical center in southern Taiwan. Community-onset bacteremia in the KTRs and a control population at the emergency department were identified. Demographic data, clinical characteristics, bacteremic pathogens, antimicrobial resistance, and clinical outcomes were recorded.ResultsForty-one bacteremic episodes in the KTRs and 82 episodes in control patients were studied. The KTR group had younger age, fewer malignancies, more urosepsis (61% vs. 22%, p = 0.004), and fewer biliary tract infections (0% vs. 13.4%, p = 0.018). Escherichia coli was the most commonly isolated pathogen in both the groups (51.2% and 41.5%, respectively). No Klebsiella pneumoniae bacteremia was noted in the KTRs, compared with 14 (17.1%) episodes in the control group (p = 0.010). Antimicrobial resistance profiles of bacteremic pathogens were similar (all p > 0.6). The KTRs with community-onset bacteremia did not have a worse outcome (in-hospital mortality rate: 2.4% vs. 10%, p = 0.172) nor more incomplete resolution of kidney injury after acute kidney injury events (21.1% vs. 25%, p > 0.99) than the control group.ConclusionKTRs with community-onset bacteremia did not fare worse in terms of clinical outcome and kidney injury

Multiplex PCR System for Rapid Detection of Pathogens in Patients with Presumed Sepsis – A Systemic Review and Meta-Analysis

Background: Blood culture is viewed as the golden standard for the diagnosis of sepsis but suffers from low sensitivity and long turnaround time. LightCycler SeptiFast (LC-SF) is a real-time multiplex polymerase chain reaction test able to detect 25 common pathogens responsible for bloodstream infections within hours. We aim to assess the accuracy of LC-SF by systematically reviewing the published studies. Method Related literature on Medline, Embase, and Cochrane databases was searched up to October 2012 for studies utilizing LC-SF to diagnose suspected sepsis and that provided sufficient data to construct two-by-two tables. Results: A total of 34 studies enrolling 6012 patients of suspected sepsis were included. The overall sensitivity and specificity for LC-SF to detect bacteremia or fungemia was 0·75 (95% CI: 0·65–0·83) and 0·92 (95%CI:0·90–0·95), respectively. LC-SF had a high positive likelihood ratio (10·10) and a moderate negative likelihood ratio (0·27). Specifically, LC-SF had a sensitivity of 0·80 (95%CI: 0·70–0·88) and a specificity of 0·95(95%CI: 0·93–0·97) for the bacteremia outcome, and a sensitivity of 0·61 (95%CI: 0·48–0·72) and a specificity of 0·99 (95%CI: 0·99–0·99) for the fungemia outcome. High heterogeneity was found in the bacteremia outcome subgroup but not in the fungemia outcome subgroup. Conclusion: LC-SF is of high rule-in value for early detection of septic patients. In a population with low pretest probability, LC-SF test can still provide valuable information for ruling out bacteremia or fungemia

Survival Prediction of Initial Blood pH for Nontraumatic Out-of-hospital Cardiac Arrest Patients in the Emergency Department

SummaryBackgroundMost nontraumatic out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (NTOHCA) patients who fail in prehospital resuscitation receive continued cardiopulmonary resuscitation in the emergency department (ED). Initial blood pH, which can be assessed rapidly in the ED, was examined to see whether it is a strong survival predictor for these patients.MethodsA 1-year retrospective study included consecutive 225 NTOHCA patients at a medical center in northern Taiwan who presented through the emergency medical services system. On arrival at the ED, these patients received continued cardiopulmonary resuscitation, and their initial blood pH data were assessed.ResultsThe pH value was positively correlated with variables such as return of spontaneous circulation, witnessed arrest, short prehospital time (≤20 minutes), and survival. The best cut-off value of initial blood pH, revealed by the receiver operating characteristic curve, was 7.068. The lowest pH value of the survivors was 6.856. The results of logistic regression model analysis shows that the odds ratios of survival was 10.0 (95% confidence interval [CI], 2.1–47.7) for patients with initial blood pH ≥ 7.068, 5.3 (95% CI, 1.48–18.9) for those with nonasystole rhythm, 4.0 (95% CI, 1.1–14.8) for those with prehospital time ≤20 minutes, and 9.1 (95% CI, 2.3–35.2) for those without NaHCO3 administration during resuscitation, respectively.ConclusionA cut-off value of an initial blood pH of 7.068 can serve as a predictor for survival among NTOHCA patients. In addition, patients whose initial blood pH is lower than 6.85 in the ED may not survive until hospital discharge