5,973 research outputs found
Facilitating innovation in SMEs: the case of public intermediaries in South Korea
This study addresses public sector intermediaries and their role in facilitating
innovation in Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs) in South Korea. The
primary aim is to understand and address the informational and relational barriers
that SMEs face during the innovation process and how these are resolved through
interaction. Although the government has been implementing SME support policies
for several decades, the Korean National Innovation System (KNIS) has been
characterised with six words: âstrong large firms, weak small firmsâ. Korean
Government policies for R&D have not been effective in enhancing the economic
performance and innovative capabilities of SMEs and the âlow level of
competitivenessâ of SMEs obstructs knowledge interaction between firms. Policies
directed at SMEs mainly focus on direct support and do not reflect the interactive
nature of the innovation process. This mismatch between policy and desired
outcomes has led this study to go beyond examining the informational and relational
constraints. It analyses the factors influencing successful (or less successful)
innovation and asks whether public intermediaries have provided an effective
mechanism in resolving innovation barriers (i.e. system failures).
Yet, there has been a lack of research into public intermediaries and SMEs within the
National Innovation Systems (NIS) framework. The NIS approach is a loosely
configured framework and the intermediary literature is fragmented and has rarely
been integrated with the NIS literature. Research has tended to focus on specific
functions of private intermediaries and far less on the public intermediaries, which
have been playing a crucial role in facilitating innovation in Korean industry for
several decades. The central focus of this study is on the knowledge interaction
process between public intermediaries and SMEs occurring at multiple levels of
interaction in the Korean NIS. This study therefore attempts to integrate the NIS
concept and the intermediary approach to provide a robust way to explore the
knowledge interaction process at meso- and micro-levels. Four functions of the
intermediary are constructed to explore how they might influence SME innovation:
knowledge facilitation, learning facilitation, knowledge enabling and managing
interfaces.
Through in-depth analysis of five case studies encompassing firms in mechatronics
and IT, this study explicates the knowledge interaction process and influential factors
of successful innovation. The analysis addresses a series of issues that the generic
NIS concept cannot fully explain: (1) knowledge interaction at meso- and microlevels;
(2) multiplicity of relationships and their evolving nature; (3) the role of
public intermediaries in a specific cultural context; and (4) the heterogeneity of
SMEs with their pre-existing resources and routines. Sociological perspectives
especially provide insights for investigating not only the dynamic nature of
interactions but also micro-level factors that determine successful interactions and
innovation that are largely neglected in both NIS and intermediary studies; e.g.
productive combination of competing rationalities, social learning, and the
importance of reflexive individuals. Focusing on a modulated NIS concept for public
sector intermediaries and SMEs in a Korean context, the study opens the âblack boxâ
of knowledge interaction and learning that resolves the barriers, shapes the
successful innovation environment and hence strengthens the innovation system.
The findings have implications for policy, including the need to establish new policy
measures aimed not simply at achieving a set goal but rather at facilitating the
interaction process with a long-term view. The study recommends that public
intermediaries need to focus on monitoring activities that integrate and support the
knowledge interaction process by facilitating âassociativenessâ among actors.
Furthermore, the heterogeneity of the local contexts and SMEs in the innovation
process need to be taken into account in designing the programmes, moving away
from one-size-fits-all type services
Doubly responsive polymersomes towards monosaccharides and temperature under physiologically relevant conditions
Organoboronic acid-containing polymers and block copolymers have recently attracted attention because of their ability to recognize important natural diol compounds such as saccharides and nucleotides under physiologically relevant conditions at neutral pH. In particular, polymers and block copolymers that are responsive toward multiple stimuli can be utilized to create smart delivery vehicles for use in applications in a complex environment. Here we report the monosaccharide-responsive polymers and block copolymers comprising styreneboroxole and oligo(ethylene glycol)-functionalized styrenes (OEG-STs) as repeating units. We have shown that homopolymers and copolymers of OEG-STs are thermally responsive by demonstrating that they possess the characteristic of tunable lower critical solution temperature (LCST) in water. When copolymerized with OEG-STs, styreneboroxole units function as a switch to change the solubility of the resulting polymers in aqueous solution by recognizing mono-saccharides via the formation of boronate ester. By introducing the minimum number of monosaccharide-responsive styreneboroxole units onto the thermally responsive OEG-ST backbone, we demonstrated the monosaccharide-responsive behavior of the resulting copolymers and their amphiphilic block copolymers in aqueous solution at physiologically relevant pH and temperature. A strategy based on doubly responsive block copolymers reported here could be utilized as new delivery vehicles for cargo molecules such as insulin, due to their ability to function in an in vivo environmentopen
Toll-like Receptors and Antimicrobial Peptides Expressions of Psoriasis: Correlation with Serum Vitamin D Level
To evaluate the association of Toll-like receptors (TLRs), antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) and vitamin D receptors (VDRs) in psoriasis, lesional (PP) and perilesional skin (PN) from psoriasis, atopic dermatitis (AD) patients and healthy controls (NN) were studied by immunohistochemistry. Compared with PN, AD and NN skin, dysregulated expression of TLRs, AMPs and VDR was detected in PP skin. Noteworthy, our results showed altered correlation between TLR2 and VDR expression in PP and PN skin. Human beta defensin 2 (HBD2) and cathelicidin (LL-37) expressions in the PP skin were higher in serum vitamin D sufficient (VDS) groups than serum vitamin D deficient (VDD) groups. Negative correlation was found between TLR2 and VDR expression in the PP skin of VDD groups. However, positive correlation was noted in the PP skin of VDS groups. Based on the present results, therapies targeting the activity of TLRs, AMPs and vitamin D, including modulation of the TLR-VDR pathways, might provide new therapeutic approaches to the psoriasis and other inflammatory skin diseases
Vision based interface system for hands free control of an intelligent wheelchair
<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Due to the shift of the age structure in today's populations, the necessities for developing the devices or technologies to support them have been increasing. Traditionally, the wheelchair, including powered and manual ones, is the most popular and important rehabilitation/assistive device for the disabled and the elderly. However, it is still highly restricted especially for severely disabled. As a solution to this, the Intelligent Wheelchairs (IWs) have received considerable attention as mobility aids. The purpose of this work is to develop the IW interface for providing more convenient and efficient interface to the people the disability in their limbs.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>This paper proposes an intelligent wheelchair (IW) control system for the people with various disabilities. To facilitate a wide variety of user abilities, the proposed system involves the use of face-inclination and mouth-shape information, where the direction of an IW is determined by the inclination of the user's face, while proceeding and stopping are determined by the shapes of the user's mouth. Our system is composed of electric powered wheelchair, data acquisition board, ultrasonic/infra-red sensors, a PC camera, and vision system. Then the vision system to analyze user's gestures is performed by three stages: detector, recognizer, and converter. In the detector, the facial region of the intended user is first obtained using Adaboost, thereafter the mouth region is detected based on edge information. The extracted features are sent to the recognizer, which recognizes the face inclination and mouth shape using statistical analysis and <it>K</it>-means clustering, respectively. These recognition results are then delivered to the converter to control the wheelchair.</p> <p>Result & conclusion</p> <p>The advantages of the proposed system include 1) accurate recognition of user's intention with minimal user motion and 2) robustness to a cluttered background and the time-varying illumination. To prove these advantages, the proposed system was tested with 34 users in indoor and outdoor environments and the results were compared with those of other systems, then the results showed that the proposed system has superior performance to other systems in terms of speed and accuracy. Therefore, it is proved that proposed system provided a friendly and convenient interface to the severely disabled people.</p
Feature Engineering Using File Layout for Malware Detection
Malware detection on binary executables provides a high availability to even
binaries which are not disassembled or decompiled. However, a binary-level
approach could cause ambiguity problems. In this paper, we propose a new
feature engineering technique that use minimal knowledge about the internal
layout on a binary. The proposed feature avoids the ambiguity problems by
integrating the information about the layout with structural entropy. The
experimental results show that our feature improves accuracy and F1-score by
3.3% and 0.07, respectively, on a CNN based malware detector with realistic
benign and malicious samples.Comment: 2pages, no figures, This manuscript was presented in the poster
session of The Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC) 202
Improving disclosure of medical error through educational program as a first step toward patient safety
ParticipantâÂÂs Response to medical errors. Description of data: Raw data of participantâÂÂs response to medical errors (3 clinical cases with different severity of error outcome), satisfaction and change after the education program. (XLSX 18 kb
- âŚ