Competitive Priorities and Strategic Consensus in Emerging Economies: Evidence from India

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to understand the competitive priorities of manufacturers in India, and examine the level of agreement or strategic consensus between senior executives and manufacturing managers on manufacturing competitive priorities in light of the prevalent culture. Design/methodology/approach – Survey data collected from 156 respondents from 78 manufacturing units based on a national sample in India are used to test the hypotheses using the paired samples t‐tests and multivariate analysis of variance. Findings – A relatively high emphasis by both levels of managers on quality, compared to the other three competitive priorities, is noteworthy and consistent with the global trends. The emphasis on delivery is a close second. Differences in competitive priorities exist across managerial levels in India despite the high power distance and low individualism. Research limitations/implications – The effect of ownership as private or public company was examined and no significant differences found, but data could not be collected on the ownership structure such as wholly owned domestic firms, foreign subsidiaries, or joint ventures. and whether a firm is a supplier to a multinational company. It may also be noted that a majority of the manufacturing companies in this paper came from three industries – chemicals, fabricated metals, and electronic and electrical equipment – and, hence, the findings of the paper might have been unduly influenced by the prevalent practices in these industries. Practical implications – The paper informs global managers and firms seeking to outsource to, or invest in, India that the Indian managers place significantly high emphasis on quality and delivery, but not as much on product variety or ability to make frequent changes to product design and production volume. The managers in India need to take note of prevailing differences in managerial priorities and efforts need to be made such that the priorities are aligned and manufacturing strategy may be unified and coordinated. Originality/value – In the Indian context, this is the first study that deployed multiple respondents to understand the manufacturing competitive priorities, and also the first to examine strategic consensus in operations strategy

Iterative graph cuts for image segmentation with a nonlinear statistical shape prior

Shape-based regularization has proven to be a useful method for delineating objects within noisy images where one has prior knowledge of the shape of the targeted object. When a collection of possible shapes is available, the specification of a shape prior using kernel density estimation is a natural technique. Unfortunately, energy functionals arising from kernel density estimation are of a form that makes them impossible to directly minimize using efficient optimization algorithms such as graph cuts. Our main contribution is to show how one may recast the energy functional into a form that is minimizable iteratively and efficiently using graph cuts.Comment: Revision submitted to JMIV (02/24/13

Poly-ε-Caprolactone/Fibrin-Alginate Scaffold: A New Pro-Angiogenic Composite Biomaterial for the Treatment of Bone Defects

We hypothesized that a composite of 3D porous melt-electrowritten poly-ɛ-caprolactone (PCL) coated throughout with a porous and slowly biodegradable fibrin/alginate (FA) matrix would accelerate bone repair due to its angiogenic potential. Scanning electron microscopy showed that the open pore structure of the FA matrix was maintained in the PCL/FA composites. Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy and differential scanning calorimetry showed complete coverage of the PCL fibres by FA, and the PCL/FA crystallinity was decreased compared with PCL. In vitro cell work with osteoprogenitor cells showed that they preferentially bound to the FA component and proliferated on all scaffolds over 28 days. A chorioallantoic membrane assay showed more blood vessel infiltration into FA and PCL/FA compared with PCL, and a significantly higher number of bifurcation points for PCL/FA compared with both FA and PCL. Implantation into a rat cranial defect model followed by microcomputed tomography, histology, and immunohistochemistry after 4- and 12-weeks post operation showed fast early bone formation at week 4, with significantly higher bone formation for FA and PCL/FA compared with PCL. However, this phenomenon was not extrapolated to week 12. Therefore, for long-term bone regeneration, tuning of FA degradation to ensure syncing with new bone formation is likely necessary

Epitope tagging of endogenous genes in diverse human cell lines

Epitope tagging is a powerful and commonly used approach for studying the physical properties of proteins and their functions and localization in eukaryotic cells. In the case of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, it has been possible to exploit the high efficiency of homologous recombination to tag proteins by modifying their endogenous genes, making it possible to tag virtually every endogenous gene and perform genome-wide proteomics experiments. However, due to the relative inefficiency of homologous recombination in cultured human cells, epitope-tagging approaches have been limited to ectopically expressed transgenes, with the attendant limitations of their nonphysiological transcriptional regulation and levels of expression. To overcome this limitation, a modification and extension of adeno-associated virus-mediated human somatic cell gene targeting technology is described that makes it possible to simply and easily create an endogenous epitope tag in the same way that it is possible to knock out a gene. Using this approach, we have created and validated human cell lines with epitope-tagged alleles of two cancer-related genes in a variety of untransformed and transformed human cell lines. This straightforward approach makes it possible to study the physical and biological properties of endogenous proteins in human cells without the need for specialized antibodies for individual proteins of interest

Elastic constants of nematic liquid crystals of uniaxial symmetry

We study in detail the influence of molecular interactions on the Frank elastic constants of uniaxial nematic liquid crystals composed of molecules of cylindrical symmetry. A brief summary of the status of theoretical development for the elastic constants of nematics is presented. Considering a pair potential having both repulsive and attractive parts numerical calculations are reported for three systems MBBA, PAA and 8OCB. For these systems the length-to-width ratio ${x_0}$ is estimated from the experimentally proposed structure of the molecules. The repulsive interaction is represented by a repulsion between hard ellipsoids of revolution (HER) and the attractive potential is represented by the quadrupole and dispersion interactions. From the numerical results we observe that in the density range of nematics the contribution of the quadrupole and dispersion interactions are small as compared to the repulsive HER interaction. The inclusion of attractive interaction reduces the values of elastic constants ratios. The temperature variation of elastic constants ratios are reported and compared with the experimental values. A reasonably good agreement between theory and experiment is observed

The Belt and Road Initiative for an intercontinental ecosystem: Strategic implications for multinational enterprises around the world

[Extract] International trade and foreign direct investment (FDI), as well as other forms of cross-border economic activities, are essential to globalization, even in the emerging era of neoglobalization as a unique balance between globalization and deglobalization. Despite the hype, globalization is a relatively new phenomenon

Scintillation Counters for the D0 Muon Upgrade

We present the results of an upgrade to the D0 muon system. Scintillating counters have been added to the existing central D0 muon system to provide rejection for cosmic ray muons and out-of-time background, and to provide additional fast timing information for muons in an upgraded Tevatron. Performance and results from the 1994-1996 Tevatron run are presented.Comment: 30 pages, 25 postscript figure

What is the real impact of acute kidney injury?

Background: Acute kidney injury (AKI) is a common clinical problem. Studies have documented the incidence of AKI in a variety of populations but to date we do not believe the real incidence of AKI has been accurately documented in a district general hospital setting. The aim here was to describe the detected incidence of AKI in a typical general hospital setting in an unselected population, and describe associated short and long-term outcomes. Methods: A retrospective observational database study from secondary care in East Kent (adult catchment population of 582,300). All adult patients (18 years or over) admitted between 1st February 2009 and 31st July 2009, were included. Patients receiving chronic renal replacement therapy (RRT), maternity and day case admissions were excluded. AKI was defined by the acute kidney injury network (AKIN) criteria. A time dependent risk analysis with logistic regression and Cox regression was used for the analysis of in-hospital mortality and survival. Results: The incidence of AKI in the 6 month period was 15,325 pmp/yr (adults) (69% AKIN1, 18% AKIN2 and 13% AKIN3). In-hospital mortality, length of stay and ITU utilisation all increased with severity of AKI. Patients with AKI had an increase in care on discharge and an increase in hospital readmission within 30 days. Conclusions: This data comes closer to the real incidence and outcomes of AKI managed in-hospital than any study published in the literature to date. Fifteen percent of all admissions sustained an episode of AKI with increased subsequent short and long term morbidity and mortality, even in those with AKIN1. This confers an increased burden and cost to the healthcare economy, which can now be quantified. These results will furnish a baseline for quality improvement projects aimed at early identification, improved management, and where possible prevention, of AKI