Preface

In the spring of 2013 thirteen motivated bachelor students of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences got the opportunity to study early travel books within the framework of a MaRBLeproject and an Honours programme. The travel books were selected from the ‘Jesuits Collection’ in the University Library. This collection includes many lavishly illustrated travel books, most of which date from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In this project we focussed, rather pragmatically, on North-America, Japan and China. The travel books bear witness of the broad interests and the highly international orientation of the Jesuits. The books do not only address Catholic missionary zeal, but deal also with trade missions and scientific expeditions. The international mindset of the Jesuits agrees well, it seems, with that of the international student population at Maastricht. Most of the students taking part in the project come from abroad and study Arts and Culture or European Studies

CNN based Cuneiform Sign Detection Learned from Annotated 3D Renderings and Mapped Photographs with Illumination Augmentation

Motivated by the challenges of the Digital Ancient Near Eastern Studies (DANES) community, we develop digital tools for processing cuneiform script being a 3D script imprinted into clay tablets used for more than three millennia and at least eight major languages. It consists of thousands of characters that have changed over time and space. Photographs are the most common representations usable for machine learning, while ink drawings are prone to interpretation. Best suited 3D datasets that are becoming available. We created and used the HeiCuBeDa and MaiCuBeDa datasets, which consist of around 500 annotated tablets. For our novel OCR-like approach to mixed image data, we provide an additional mapping tool for transferring annotations between 3D renderings and photographs. Our sign localization uses a RepPoints detector to predict the locations of characters as bounding boxes. We use image data from GigaMesh's MSII (curvature, see https://gigamesh.eu) based rendering, Phong-shaded 3D models, and photographs as well as illumination augmentation. The results show that using rendered 3D images for sign detection performs better than other work on photographs. In addition, our approach gives reasonably good results for photographs only, while it is best used for mixed datasets. More importantly, the Phong renderings, and especially the MSII renderings, improve the results on photographs, which is the largest dataset on a global scale.Comment: This paper was accepted to ICCV23 and includes the DOI for an Open Access Dataset with annotated cuneiform scrip

Organizational linkages for new product development: Implementation of innovation projects

Effective external and internal organization linkage characterizes new product development. Although prior research covers the external linkages to gain operational efficiencies and develop new products, the current body of scholarship on internal cross-functional linkages requires further attention. This study provides a certain level of inquiry into the antecedents of such internal linkages and presents a framework to establish the relationship between two internal functions at major fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG). The study examines the implementation of 150 innovation projects in 6 different countries over a period of three years. The objective is to study the influence of trust dimension on the perceived effectiveness of cross-functional linkage to highlight how organizational mechanisms like the amount and quality of shared communication affect trust and relationship between two functions

Practical Applications as a Source of Credibility: A Comparison of Three Fields of Dutch Academic Chemistry

In many Western science systems, funding structures increasingly stimulate academic research to contribute to practical applications, but at the same time the rise of bibliometric performance assessments have strengthened the pressure on academics to conduct excellent basic research that can be published in scholarly literature. We analyze the interplay between these two developments in a set of three case studies of fields of chemistry in the Netherlands. First, we describe how the conditions under which academic chemists work have changed since 1975. Second, we investigate whether practical applications have become a source of credibility for individual researchers. Indeed, this turns out to be the case in catalysis, where connecting with industrial applications helps in many steps of the credibility cycle. Practical applications yield much less credibility in environmental chemistry, where application-oriented research agendas help to acquire funding, but not to publish prestigious papers or to earn peer recognition. In biochemistry practical applications hardly help in gaining credibility, as this field is still strongly oriented at fundamental questions. The differences between the fields can be explained by the presence or absence of powerful upstream end-users, who can afford to invest in academic research with promising long term benefits

Processes and integration in the interaction of purchasing and marketing: considering synergy and symbiosis

Effective integration of both purchasing and marketing functions is central to effective value creation and alignment of an organization with its business environment. Rapidly changing environments create gaps in the value creation process that compromises the delivery of value to the customer and risk misalignment of value propositions to their needs. Despite the clear imperative for research in this area, the extant literature is partial and delivers limited coherence. Ours is a theoretical article that—in drawing on previous literature—introduces the new work collected in this special issue and considers this against our own empirical evidence. We present a framework that maps out the landscape of internal organizational integration with a particular emphasis on purchasing and marketing integration. Implications for theory and managers are explored

Genetic and neurological foundations of customer orientation: field and experimental evidence

We explore genetic and neurological bases for customer orientation (CO) and contrast them with sales orientation (SO). Study 1 is a field study that establishes that CO, but not SO, leads to greater opportunity recognition. Study 2 examines genetic bases for CO and finds that salespeople with CO are more likely to have the 7R variant of the DRD4 gene. This is consistent with basic research on dopamine receptor activity in the brain that underlies novelty seeking, the reward function, and risk taking. Study 3 examines the neural basis of CO and finds that salespeople with CO, but not SO, experience greater activation of their mirror neuron systems and neural processes associated with empathy. Managerial and research implications are discussed