Identification of optimal international market strategies:comparative case study of Finnish health tech startups

Abstract. Technological advancements and internationalisation has changed the dynamics of economic growth. As countries move towards entrepreneurial growth, the traditional large-scale organizations have become obsolete. Instead small and medium enterprises have contributed to the economy through job creation and increasing of exports. Technological start-ups with their lean structure and high growth have contributed to the economy manifold. In this regard Finland is known to have one of the leading start-up eco-systems globally. Health tech start-ups in Finland have contributed to economic growth through their exports and provided the country with an innovative technological base. They have further provided growth through job creation and foreign market penetration. This research is conducted to study the factors that enable a health tech start-up to internationalise and contribute to economic growth in Finland. Entrepreneurial orientation, market driven management, networking and culture are the internal and external factors associated with international entrepreneurship and studied in this research. Data was collected through semi structured interviews from three health tech start-ups in Finland, that have created an international customer base within the first six years of their operations. Results of the study show that entrepreneurial orientation when treated as a collective of its three constructs, innovativeness, risk taking and pro-activeness is an internal factor that enables a start-up to develop competitive advantage and seek international opportunities. Whereas market driven management was found essential for the start-ups to maintain that competitive advantage in international markets. Networking was found to have a significant impact on retention of international opportunities while culture did not seem to drive the international efforts of health tech start-ups

Induction of WNT16 via peptide-mRNA nanoparticle-based delivery maintains cartilage homeostasis

Osteoarthritis (OA) is a progressive joint disease that causes significant disability and pain and for which there are limited treatment options. We posit that delivery of anabolic factors that protect and maintain cartilage homeostasis will halt or retard OA progression. We employ a peptide-based nanoplatform to deliver Wingless and the name Int-1 (WNT) 16 messenger RNA (mRNA) to human cartilage explants. The peptide forms a self-assembled nanocomplex of approximately 65 nm in size when incubated with WNT16 mRNA. The complex is further stabilized with hyaluronic acid (HA) for enhanced cellular uptake. Delivery of peptide-WNT16 mRNA nanocomplex to human cartilage explants antagonizes canonical β-catenin/WNT3a signaling, leading to increased lubricin production and decreased chondrocyte apoptosis. This is a proof-of-concept study showing that mRNA can be efficiently delivered to articular cartilage, an avascular tissue that is poorly accessible even when drugs are intra-articularly (IA) administered. The ability to accommodate a wide range of oligonucleotides suggests that this platform may find use in a broad range of clinical applications

A Comparative Performance Analysis of Two Printed Circular Arrays for Power-Based Vehicle Localization Applications

A comparative study of the performance characteristics of a printed 8-element V-shaped circular antenna array and an 8-element Yagi circular array operating at 2.45 GHz for vehicular direction finding applications is presented. Two operating modes are investigated; switched and phased modes. The arrays were fabricated on FR-4 substrates with 0.8 mm thickness. Measured and simulated results were compared. Radiation gain patterns were measured on a 1 m diameter ground plane that resembles the rooftop of a vehicle. The HPBW of the Yagi was found to be about 3° narrower than its V-shaped counterpart when measured above a reflecting ground plane and operated in switched mode. The printed V-shaped antenna array offers 2.5 dB extra gain compared to the printed Yagi array

Research challenges in 5G networks: a HetNets perspective

This paper highlights use cases, emerging machine type communication (MTC) technologies, ongoing research activities, and existing research challenges in 5G networks. 5G networks are faced with the following challenges: (i) handling large amounts of data, (ii) coping with different types of data traffic, i.e., human-type, machine-type, and combined-type (iii) connecting billions of machines, and (iv) severe resource limitations of devices. The ubiquitous nature of cellular networks make them the preferred choice for access networks, but a lack of communication resources is a problem. To address the resource scarcity issue, different wireless access networks may combine to form a heterogeneous network (HetNet) and hence become a single 5G network. For long-term success of 5G networks, we envision the following as important research outputs: (i) a scalable 5G network architecture that can handle a large number of human users and machines considering different constraints, (ii) a comprehensive quality of service (QoS) framework to satisfy heterogeneous users and machines requirements, (iii) a procedure for intelligent access network selection, and (iv) comprehensive inter-network handover mechanisms

Laboratory and field investigations in granular soils to correlate relative density, relative compaction and grain size

An attempt has been made to correlate relative density and relative compaction based on laboratory and field test data. In this investigation, 185 sandy soil samples were tested in the laboratory. The experimental investigations include classification tests, maximum and minimum density tests, and standard and modified Proctor and in-situ density tests. The values of the dry unit weight of these samples obtained by performing different tests fall between 14.7 kN/m(3) and 20.8 kN/m(3). Based on these results, linear and multivariate regression analyses were carried out to (a) relate relative compaction and relative density, (b) relate maximum (e(max)) and minimum void ratios (e(min)), and (c) express e(max) and e(min) in terms of median grain size (D-50) and uniformity coefficient (C-u). Experimental and predicted values varied +/- 5%, with a 95% confidence interval for the relation between relative compaction and relative density, and for other relations the variation was +/- 10%. The proposed equations were validated using a new data set which had not been used for the development of the correlations. Proposed equations were also compared with equations presented by various other researchers. Validation of the proposed equations suggests that these equations may be used for future prediction of the respective variables

Gender recognition from facial images: Two or three dimensions?

© 2016 Optical Society of America. This paper seeks to compare encoded features from both two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) face images in order to achieve automatic gender recognition with high accuracy and robustness. The Fisher vector encoding method is employed to produce 2D, 3D, and fused features with escalated discriminative power. For 3D face analysis, a two-source photometric stereo (PS) method is introduced that enables 3D surface reconstructions with accurate details as well as desirable efficiency. Moreover, a 2D + 3D imaging device, taking the two-source PS method as its core, has been developed that can simultaneously gather color images for 2D evaluations and PS images for 3D analysis. This system inherits the superior reconstruction accuracy from the standard (three or more light) PS method but simplifies the reconstruction algorithm as well as the hardware design by only requiring two light sources. It also offers great potential for facilitating human computer interaction by being accurate, cheap, efficient, and nonintrusive. Ten types of low-level 2D and 3D features have been experimented with and encoded for Fisher vector gender recognition. Evaluations of the Fisher vector encoding method have been performed on the FERET database, Color FERET database, LFW database, and FRGCv2 database, yielding 97.7%, 98.0%, 92.5%, and 96.7% accuracy, respectively. In addition, the comparison of 2D and 3D features has been drawn from a self-collected dataset, which is constructed with the aid of the 2D + 3D imaging device in a series of data capture experiments. With a variety of experiments and evaluations, it can be proved that the Fisher vector encoding method outperforms most state-of-the-art gender recognition methods. It has also been observed that 3D features reconstructed by the two-source PS method are able to further boost the Fisher vector gender recognition performance, i.e., up to a 6% increase on the self-collected database

RPL-based routing protocols for multi-sink wireless sensor networks

Recent studies demonstrate that the performance of a wireless sensor network (WSN) can be improved by deploying multiple sinks in the network. Therefore, in this paper we present different routing protocols for multi-sink WSNs based on the routing protocol for low-power and lossy networks (RPL). Our protocols use different routing metrics and objective functions (OFs). We use the available bandwidth, delay, MAC layer queue occupancy, and expected transmission count (ETX) as the tie-breaking metrics in conjunction with the shortest hop-count metric. Our OFs use the tie-breaking metrics on a greedy or end-to-end basis. Our simulation results demonstrate that the protocols based on the delay, buffer occupancy, and ETX metrics demonstrate best performance, increasing the packet delivery ratio by up to 25% and decreasing the number of retransmissions by up to 65%, compared to a version of the RPL protocol that only uses the hop-count metric. Another key insight is that, using the tie-breaking metrics on a greedy basis demonstrates a slight performance improvement compared to using the metrics on an end-to-end basis. Finally, our results also demonstrate that multiple sinks inside a WSN improve the RPL-based protocol performance