Toward a process theory of entrepreneurship: revisiting opportunity identification and entrepreneurial actions

This dissertation studies the early development of new ventures and small business and the entrepreneurship process from initial ideas to viable ventures. I unpack the micro-foundations of entrepreneurial actions and new ventures’ investor communications through quality signals to finance their growth path. This dissertation includes two qualitative papers and one quantitative study. The qualitative papers employ an inductive multiple-case approach and include seven medical equipment manufacturers (new ventures) in a nascent market context (the mobile health industry) across six U.S. states and a secondary data analysis to understand the emergence of opportunities and the early development of new ventures. The quantitative research chapter includes 770 IPOs in the manufacturing industries in the U.S. and investigates the legitimation strategies of young ventures to gain resources from targeted resource-holders.Open Acces

Fundamental Vortices, Wall-Crossing, and Particle-Vortex Duality

We explore 1d vortex dynamics of 3d supersymmetric Yang-Mills theories, as inferred from factorization of exact partition functions. Under Seiberg-like dualities, the 3d partition function must remain invariant, yet it is not a priori clear what should happen to the vortex dynamics. We observe that the 1d quivers for the vortices remain the same, and the net effect of the 3d duality map manifests as 1d Wall-Crossing phenomenon; Although the vortex number can shift along such duality maps, the ranks of the 1d quiver theory are unaffected, leading to a notion of fundamental vortices as basic building blocks for topological sectors. For Aharony-type duality, in particular, where one must supply extra chiral fields to couple with monopole operators on the dual side, 1d wall-crossings of an infinite number of vortex quiver theories are neatly and collectively encoded by 3d determinant of such extra chiral fields. As such, 1d wall-crossing of the vortex theory encodes the particle-vortex duality embedded in the 3d Seiberg-like duality. For $\mathcal N = 4$, the D-brane picture is used to motivate this 3d/1d connection, while, for $\mathcal N = 2$, this 3d/1d connection is used to fine-tune otherwise ambiguous vortex dynamics. We also prove some identities of 3d supersymmetric partition functions for the Aharony duality using this vortex wall-crossing interpretation.Comment: 75 pages, 24 figures; v2: a reference added, published versio

Parity-Violating Nuclear Force as derived from QCD Sum Rules

Parity-violating nuclear force, as may be accessed from parity violation studies in nuclear systems, represents an area of nonleptonic weak interactions which has been the subject of experimental investigations for several decades. In the simple meson-exchange picture, parity-violating nuclear force may be parameterized as arising from exchange of \pi, \rho, \omega, or other meson(s) with strong meson-nucleon coupling at one vertex and weak parity-violating meson-nucleon coupling at the other vertex. The QCD sum rule method allows for a fairly complicated, but nevertheless straightforward, leading-order loop-contribution determination of the various parity-violating MNN couplings starting from QCD (with the nontrivial vacuum) and Glashow-Salam-Weinberg electroweak theory. We continue our earlier investigation of parity-violating \pi NN coupling (by Henley, Hwang, and Kisslinger) to other parity-violating couplings. Our predictions are in reasonable overall agreement with the results estimated on phenomenological grounds, such as in the now classic paper of Desplanques, Donoghue, and Holstein (DDH), in the global experimental fit of Adelberger and Haxton (AH), or the effective field theory (EFT) thinking of Ramsey-Musolf and Page (RP).Comment: 17 pages, 5 figure

Information in Environmental Architecture: Ecological Network Analysis and New indices of Building Performance

This dissertation suggests a new framework and indices of building performance evaluation based on an eco-systemic approach. The energy-efficient building construction and operation are important to achieve sustainability. Nevertheless, efficiency does not fully account for the building’s complex environmental phenomena in which nature, art, and human living are inseparably involved. In particular, increasing efficiency cannot clearly associate the robustness and stability of the building’s internal energetic organization (and trade-offs between energy efficiency and material use) with building form and occupant behavior. The purpose of this study is to argue that environmental information content is a substantial source to achieve building sustainability and to suggest that an emergy (spelled with an “m”)-coupled information measure is the most comprehensive and holistic index of building performance. Based on ecosystems theory, this dissertation defines building as a thermodynamic system that utilizes, transfers, and self-organizes the useful environmental resources―energy, material, and information―through networking processes. Definitions and formulas of information measures and ecological indicators from Shannon’s information theory, Ulanowicz’s ascendency principle, and Odum’s maximum empower principle are discussed and adopted to develop a new methodology of integrating building information and emergy and a model of building emergy-flow networking. A hypothetical generic building system is modeled and tested to characterize the building’s systematic behavior with the examination of information change. Results of the hypothetical tests show that the informational characteristics of building emergy-flow networking parallels the phenomenological evidences of ecosystems development and sustainability―increasing complexity, resilience, fitness, and useful energy (power). To verify the consistency between ecosystem development and building sustainability, experiments were conducted with two case study buildings: a net-zero energy building (NZEB) and a non-NZEB. Emergy-integrated information analyses according to the suggested governing equations and system models were carried out. Results show that the non-NZEB tends to be more resilient and adaptable and to have more “generative” empower (or total system information), even though the NZEB is more efficient. This indicates that high-performance (high-efficient) buildings may end up greater nonrenewable inputs. On the other hand, the investigation of the information content of building envelope demonstrates that human activities can generate the largest amount of useful information content than any other building system components, and the responsive building form coupled with smart human behavior contribute the most to increasing resilience, power, and information. Findings demonstrate that buildings self-organize internally, like ecosystems, with the inputs and outputs of resources. This eventually suggests that increasing complexity, total information, and power be the final goal of building sustainability and environmental building design