How loudly should an entrepreneur communicate their sustainability claim to investors in order to successfully receive funding?

Today, the impact a business activity has on the larger society is experiencing a growing amount of importance. Stronger environmental expectations from different stakeholders such as gov-ernments, consumers and employees result from the increasing ecological issues our world is currently facing. As a reaction to this, companies and big cooperations change their strategies, putting a greater focus on CSR or adding environmental innovations. At the same time, we can observe a new breed of social entrepreneurs emerging in the market, creating commercial for-profit organizations integrating the sustainability aspect into the center of their business models as they see it as a business opportunity. To date, research on the communication of startups sustainability claim in front of different stakeholders has remained scarce. Therefore, this study aims to investigate how this new breed of entrepreneurs communicate their sustainability claim to investors in order to successfully attract funding. The focus is on whether the startup needs to change the strength of it, and therefore communicates a different value proposition to their investors compared to their customers. An inductive multiple case study of five startups who are part of the Climate-KIC platform was performed. The analysis revealed that how strong a startup decides to communicate its sustainability claim to investors always depends on what investor type they are approaching. Whilst always telling the “truth”, with knowing who they are communicating to, startups constantly adjust their pitch deck ac-cordingly, putting a weaker or stronger focus on it. The study enhances valuable insights and guidelines for startups who integrate a sustainability aspect into their business model in order better approach investors and therefore to successfully attract funding.Hoje em dia, o impacto que uma actividade empresarial exerce sobre a sociedade está a ganhar cada vez maior importância. Expectativas ambientais dos diferentes stakeholders, tais como governos, consumidores e funcionários, são o resultado de pressões ecológicas que o planeta actualmente enfrenta. Como resposta, empresas e grandes organizações estão a mudar as suas estratégias, pondo um foco maior em CSR ou investindo em inovações ambientais. Ao mesmo tempo, pode-se observar uma nova geração de empreendedores com preocupações sociais, os quais criam organizações comerciais com fins lucrativos que integram o aspecto da sustentabi-lidade no centro do seu modelo de negócio, considerada também uma oportunidade de negócio. Até à data, os estudos sobre a comunicação da sustentabilidade das startups perante diferentes stakeholders são escassos. Com isto, este estudo tem como objetivo investigar como é que esta nova geração de empreen-dedores comunica as suas práticas de sustentabilidade a investidores, para obter o financia-mento necessário para o sucesso. O foco principal está em saber se a startup precisa de ajustar a sua mensagem quando comunica a proposta de valor, tornado a diferente de investidores e consumidores. Foi realizado um estudo de casos múltiplos indutivo, com cinco startups perten-centes ao programa Climate-KIC. A análise demonstrou que a intensidade com que uma startup comunica as suas práticas de sustentabilidade aos seus investidores depende do tipo de investi-dor que pretende atingir. Apesar de dizerem sempre a “verdade”, quando sabem com quem estão a comunicar, as startups acabam por ajustar o seu discurso. O estudo realizado visa obter insights e orientações valiosas para startups que tenham em conta no seu modelo de negócio o aspecto da sustentabilidade, com o intuito de melhorar a abordagem feita aos investidores e, com isso, obter financiamentos de sucesso

Recent finding and new technologies in nephrolithiasis: a review of the recent literature

This review summarizes recent literature on advances regarding renal and ureteral calculi, with particular focus in areas of recent advances in the overall field of urolithiasis. Clinical management in everyday practice requires a complete understanding of the issues regarding metabolic evaluation and subgrouping of stone-forming patients, diagnostic procedures, effective treatment regime in acute stone colic, medical expulsive therapy, and active stone removal. In this review we focus on new perspectives in managing nephrolitihiasis and discuss recentadvances, including medical expulsive therapy, new technologies, and refinements of classical therapy such as shock wave lithotripsy, give a fundamental modification of nephrolithiasis management. Overall, this field appears to be the most promising, capable of new developments in ureterorenoscopy and percutaneous approaches. Further improvements are expected from robotic-assisted procedures, such as flexible robotics in ureterorenoscopy

Unveiling operator growth in SYK quench dynamics

We study non-equilibrium dynamics induced by a sudden quench of strongly correlated Hamiltonians with all-to-all interactions. By relying on a Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) based quench protocol, we show that the time evolution of simple spin-spin correlation functions is highly sensitive to the degree of locality of the corresponding operators, once an appropriate set of fundamental fields is identified. By tracking the time-evolution of specific spin-spin correlation functions and their decay, we argue that it is possible to distinguish between operator hopping and operator growth dynamics; the latter being a hallmark of quantum chaos in many-body quantum systems. Such observation, in turn, could constitute a promising tool to probe the emergence of chaotic behavior, rather accessible in state-of-the-art quench setups.Comment: v2: Fixed broken Unicode characters; REVTeX4-1, 13 pages, 14 figure

Pulsed homodyne measurements of femtosecond squeezed pulses generated by single-pass parametric deamplification

A new scheme is described for pulsed squeezed light generation using femtosecond pulses parametrically deamplified through a single pass in a thin (0.1mm) potassium niobate KNbO3 crystal, with a significant deamplification of about -3dB. The quantum noise of each individual pulse is registered in the time domain using a single-shot homodyne detection operated with femtosecond pulses and the best squeezed quadrature variance was measured to be 1.87 dB below the shot noise level. Such a scheme provides the basic ressource for time-resolved quantum communication protocols.Comment: Accepted for publication in Optics Letter

Tree biomass equations from terrestrial LiDAR : a case study in Guyana

Large uncertainties in tree and forest carbon estimates weaken national efforts to accurately estimate aboveground biomass (AGB) for their national monitoring, measurement, reporting and verification system. Allometric equations to estimate biomass have improved, but remain limited. They rely on destructive sampling; large trees are under-represented in the data used to create them; and they cannot always be applied to different regions. These factors lead to uncertainties and systematic errors in biomass estimations. We developed allometric models to estimate tree AGB in Guyana. These models were based on tree attributes (diameter, height, crown diameter) obtained from terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) point clouds from 72 tropical trees and wood density. We validated our methods and models with data from 26 additional destructively harvested trees. We found that our best TLS-derived allometric models included crown diameter, provided more accurate AGB estimates (R-2 = 0.92-0.93) than traditional pantropical models (R-2 = 0.85-0.89), and were especially accurate for large trees (diameter > 70 cm). The assessed pantropical models underestimated AGB by 4 to 13%. Nevertheless, one pantropical model (Chave et al. 2005 without height) consistently performed best among the pantropical models tested (R-2 = 0.89) and predicted AGB accurately across all size classes-which but for this could not be known without destructive or TLS-derived validation data. Our methods also demonstrate that tree height is difficult to measure in situ, and the inclusion of height in allometric models consistently worsened AGB estimates. We determined that TLS-derived AGB estimates were unbiased. Our approach advances methods to be able to develop, test, and choose allometric models without the need to harvest trees