Open innovation management: Challenges and prospects

AbstractInnovation is the key to maintain competitive advantage in a market and gain leadership. Open innovation is a pioneering mechanism with increasing number of studies in the literature. However, there is lack of studies on open innovation in South Korea. In addition, there are still number of issues unclear in open innovation theory because of its wide concept. Therefore, the research aims to analyse the characteristics of open innovation in South Korea and examine the challenges of open innovation theory. The research surveyed about 85 South Korean companies to investigate whether there are significant differences in open innovation activities in four environmental factors (industry type, company size, market type, and R&D intensity) and to examine current challenges of open innovation and its nature The results of the survey indicated that South Korean companies’ open innovation generally diverge from main trends in open innovation shown in existing studies

Efficient Nitrogen Removal of Reject Water Generated from Anaerobic Digester Treating Sewage Sludge and Livestock Manure by Combining Anammox and Autotrophic Sulfur Denitrification Processes

The reject water from anaerobic digestion with high (Total Nitrogen) TN concentration was treated by a demonstration plant combining the anammox process and SOD (SOD®; Sulfur Oxidation Denitrification) process. The anaerobic digestion was a co-digestion of livestock wastewater, food waste water, and sewage sludge so that the TN concentration and conductivity of the reject water were very high. This anammox plant was the first anammox demonstration plant in South Korea. The maximum TN removal efficiency of 80% was achieved for the anammox reactor under nitrogen loading rate (NLR) of 0.45 kg-N/m3·d. As a result of decreasing the dilution of the reject water, the influent conductivity and NLR values were increased to 7.8 mS/cm and 0.7 kg/m3·d, causing a rapid decrease in the TN removal efficiency. The sludge concentration from the hydro-cyclone overflow was about 40 mg-MLVSS/L in which small sized anammox granules were detected. It was proven that the increase in (Mixed Liquor Volatile Suspended Solids) MLVSS concentration in the anammox reactor was not easy under high influent conductivity and NLR. 97% of NO2−-N+NO3−-N generated from the anammox process could be treated successfully by the SOD reactor. A TN removal efficiency of 35% under poor annamox treatment could increase to 67% by applying the SOD reactor post treatment for the removal of NO3−-N. The dominant anammox bacteria in the anammox reactor was identified as Brocadia fulgida and 9.3% (genus level) of the bacteria out of the total bacteria were anammox bacteria

Levels and patterns of self-reported and objectively-measured free-living physical activity among prostate cancer survivors: a prospective cohort study

Background: No prior study has measured or compared self-reported and objectively-measured physical activity trajectories in prostate cancer survivors before and after treatment. Methods: Clinically-localized prostate cancer patients treated with radical prostatectomy were recruited from 2011-2014. Of the 350 participants enrolled at the main site, 310 provided self-reported physical activity at baseline before radical prostatectomy, and 5 weeks, 6 months, and 12 months post-radical prostatectomy. A subset of participants (n=81) provided objectively-measured physical activity at all study time points by wearing an accelerometer for seven days each. Changes in activity over time were compared using Friedman’s test. Agreement between self-reported and objective measures was evaluated using Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient. Results: Self-reported moderate-to-vigorous physical activity was high at baseline (median=32.1 minutes/day), followed by a decline at 5 weeks (15.0 minutes/day) and a recovery at 6 and 12 months (32.1-47.1 minutes/day). In contrast, objectively-measured moderate-to-vigorous physical activity was low at all four time points (median=0.0-5.2 minutes/day), with no overall change across study assessments (global p=0.29). Self-reported moderate-to-vigorous physical activity tended to be more closely related to objectively-measured light intensity physical activity (rho=0.29-0.42) than to objectively-measured moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (rho=0.07-0.27, p=0.009-0.32). Conclusions: In our population of prostate cancer survivors with critically low moderate-to-vigorous physical activity levels, self-reported measures greatly overestimated moderate-to-vigorous physical activity and may have been more reflective of light intensity physical activity. As cancer survivor guidelines were derived from self-reported data, our findings may imply that intensities of physical activity below moderate, such as light intensity, still have health benefits