Understanding Japan’s Sharing Economy: National System of Innovation and Institutional Work Perspectives

In recent years, the rise of so-called the Sharing Economy and collaborative consumption (CC) has caught our eye. The emergence of ‘the Sharing Economy’ has brought people plenty of conveniences to use under-utilised inventory through fee-based sharing collaboratively. It is widely believed that Japan's sharing economy is relatively small in comparison to other major economies, with platforms like Uber and Airbnb having a limited presence in Japan compared to their popularity in the US, Europe, and China. The Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications also states that the size of Japan’s Sharing Economy is relatively small compared to the USA, China, Germany, India, the UK, and Korea. This research addresses this puzzle by seeking answers to why Japan’s Sharing Economy has evolved relatively slowly, and why it remains small, especially compared with many other developed and even some developing countries. As there is no existing theory to explain the lag of Japan’s Sharing Economy, this research takes a macro perspective, theoretically informed by the national system of innovation (NSI) literature that has won recognition in explaining innovation processes and specific innovation patterns of countries. The Sharing Economy has been regarded as a new form of progress innovation that creates a new way for people to access goods and services. This research adds a meso-layer analysis, by adopting the institutional work framework to understand the dynamic development of Japan’s Sharing Economy. As there is scarce literature about Japan’s Sharing Economy, an exploratory approach was chosen for this thesis. By adopting qualitative methods, this original study identifies and examines the different factors that can explain the relatively slow development of Japan’s Sharing Economy. This study found that Japan’s National System of Innovation overall does not drive the development of Japan’s Sharing Economy. Adopting the institutional work lens, we can see that efforts have been made by actors that intend to promote Japan's Sharing Economy. However, their institutional work is not yet influential enough to fundamentally encourage the development of Japan's Sharing Economy. This research contributes to the Sharing Economy’s theoretical foundation, tests the national innovation system in this new form of innovation, and proposes a two-layer macro/meso perspective to look into the Sharing Economy

Proteomic analyses in diverse populations improved risk prediction and identified new drug targets for type 2 diabetes

Objective: Integrated analyses of plasma proteomics and genetic data in prospective studies can help assess the causal relevance of proteins, improve risk prediction and discover novel protein drug targets for T2D. Research Design and Methods: We measured plasma levels of 2923 proteins using OLINK Explore among ~2000 randomly selected participants from CKB without prior diabetes at baseline. Cox regression assessed associations of individual protein with incident T2D (n=92 cases). Proteomic-based risk models were developed with discrimination, calibration, reclassification assessed using AUC, calibration plots and NRI, respectively. Two-sample MR analyses using cis-pQTLs identified in GWAS of CKB and UKB for specific proteins were conducted to assess their causal relevance for T2D, along with colocalization analyses to examine shared causal variants between proteins and T2D. Results: Overall 33 proteins were significantly associated (FDR0.6) of shared genetic variants of LPL and PON3 with T2D. Conclusion: Proteomic analyses in Chinese adults identified novel associations of multiple proteins with T2D with strong genetic evidence supporting their causal relevance and potential as novel drug targets for prevention and treatment of T2D

Tunability of photoluminescence of InAs/GaAs quantum dots by growth pause introduced ripening

The effect of dot ripening pause on self organized InAs/GaAs QD's grown by MBE at two different growth rates and the resulting tunability of emission properties were studied with the help of PL and AFM experiments. We found the evolution of larger coherent islands with dot-pause due to high surface mobility of the In adatoms at the growth temperature resulting in a redshift in the PL spectra. A small blue shift in the emission is observed in case of the islands grown at higher growth rate and being allowed to ripen for sufficient time due to In desorption at high growth temperature

Specific and sensitive detection of the guava fruit anthracnose pathogen (Colletotrichum gloeosporioides) by loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) assay

Anthracnose of guava, caused by the fungus Colletotrichum gloeosporioides, is a major factor limiting worldwide guava production. Timely and accurate detection of the pathogen is important in developing a disease management strategy. Herein, a loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) assay for the specific and sensitive detection of C. gloeosporioides was developed using primers targeting the β-tubulin 2 (TUB2) gene. The optimal reaction conditions were 64 °C for 60 min. The specificity of the method was tested against C. gloeosporioides isolates, Colletotrichum spp. isolates, and isolates of other genera. Positive results were obtained only in the presence of C. gloeosporioides, whereas no cross-reaction was observed for other species. The detection limit of the LAMP assay was 10 fg of genomic DNA in a 25 μL reaction. The LAMP assay successfully detected C. gloeosporioides in guava fruit collected in the field. The results indicate that the developed LAMP assay is a simple, cost-effective, rapid, highly sensitive, and specific tool for the diagnosis of guava anthracnose caused by C. gloeosporioides and could be useful for disease management.The accepted manuscript in pdf format is listed with the files at the bottom of this page. The presentation of the authors' names and (or) special characters in the title of the manuscript may differ slightly between what is listed on this page and what is listed in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript; that in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript is what was submitted by the author

Enhancing the performance of blue GaN-based light emitting diodes with carrier concentration adjusting layer

In this work, a novel carrier concentration adjusting insertion layer for InGaN/GaN multiple quantum wells light-emitting diodes was proposed to mitigate the efficiency droop and improve optical output properties at high current density. The band diagrams and carrier distributions were investigated numerically and experimentally. The results indicate that due to the newly formed electron barrier and the adjusted built-in field near the active region, the hole injection has been improved and a better radiative recombination can be achieved. Compared to the conventional LED, the light output power of our new structure with the carrier concentration adjusting layers is enhanced by 127% at 350 mA , while the efficiency only droops to be 88.2% of its peak efficiency