INTER-ORGANIZATIONAL COLLABORATION FOR INNOVATION IN MANUFACTURING FIRMS

From day to day, taking part in the collaboration process in different business aspects, especially in the innovation process continues to gain in importance. Innovation enables companies to strive for a more powerful market position, while inter-organizational cooperation is perceived as an efficient means of enhancement of firm innovativeness. The purpose of this paper is to present the state of inter-organizational collaboration for innovation among manufacturing companies in Vojvodina, analyzing cooperation among manufacturing firms with different external parties, in different innovation areas. Furthermore, the aim is to examine the effects of inter-organizational collaboration on the innovativeness of manufacturing firms in Vojvodina. The data used in this paper was gathered within the international project European Manufacturing Survey. The results are presented using descriptive statistics and they demonstrate that the existence and frequency of inter-organizational collaboration, although quite present, depends on external parties as potential cooperation partners and on different innovation areas in which collaboration could occur. Also, the research shows there is a notable relation between interorganizational collaboration and firm innovativeness

In Hcmv-Exposed Huvec, P52/Relb Regulatory Factors Mediate Activation of the Human Par1 Gene Promoter

We studied the effect of HCMV (AD-169) on the regulation of PAR1 reporter activity in HUVEC. In HUVEC, HCMV significantly induced activation of PAR1 reporter constructs carrying AP-2-like and two complexes of AP-2/Sp1-binding elements. Shorter constructs with no AP-2-like binding elements had lower activity upon virus inoculation. Moreover, activity of the shortest construct without binding elements was not significantly increased in virus-exposed cells. Furthermore, in HCMV-exposed cells, activity of the PARI reporter was significantly augmented upon p52/RelB transfection. Taken together, the data indicate that activity of the PAR1 promoter is highly dependent on AP-2/Sp1 binding elements and mediated by p52/RelB regulatory factors

Characterization of indigenous bacillus isolates from stabilized sludge in petrochemical industry

Bacillus species are rod-shaped, endospore-forming aerobic or facultatively anaerobic, Gram-positive bacteria; in some species cultures may turn Gram-negative with age. The many species of the genus exhibit a wide range of physiologic abilities that allow them to live in every natural environment. The spores are resistant to heat, cold, radiation, desiccation, and disinfectants. Bacillus species are used in many medical, pharmaceutical, agricultural, and industrial processes that take advantage of their wide range of physiologic characteristics and their ability to produce a host of enzymes, antibiotics, and other metabolites. Certain Bacillus species are important in the natural or artificial degradation of waste products. We isolated 15 indigenous Bacillus isolates from stabilized sludge in petrochemical plant in Serbia (FOV – HIP “Petrohemija”, Pancevo) and investigated their morphological and biochemical characteristics, emulsification activity and sensitivity to antibiotics and heavy metals. In addition, we estimated the genetic diversity of isolates by RAPD and rep-PCR. Three of 15 isolates showed very strong emulsification ability of xylol (E24 from 95 to 100). Six isolates showed strong emulsification of mineral oil (E24 from 78 to 100). All isolates were tolerant to 100μg/ml of Zn and Co, 10μg/ml of Hg and Mo, while eleven isolates showed tolerance to 10μg/ml of Cd and six isolates to 100μg/ml Hg. Only one isolate was sensitive to trimethoprim (5 μg). All isolates were sensitive to bacitracin (40U), cephalexin (30 μg), clindamycin (2 μg) and neomycin (120μg), while five isolates were resistant to novobiocin (5μg) and two to bacitracin (40U). Based on PCR analysis, we assessed genetic similarity of investigated Bacillus isolates

The SP2 SCOPES Project on Speech Prosody

This is an overview of a Joint Research Project within the Scientific co-operation between Eastern Europe and Switzerland (SCOPES) Program of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNFS) and Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC). Within the SP2 SCOPES Project on Speech Prosody, in the course of the following two years, the four partners aim to collaborate on the subject of speech prosody and advance the extraction, processing, modeling and transfer of prosody for a large portfolio of European languages: French, German, Italian, English, Hungarian, Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Montenegrin, and Macedonian. Through the intertwined four research plans, synergies are foreseen to emerge that will build a foundation for submitting strong joint proposals for EU funding

Design of a Speech Corpus for Research on Cross-Lingual Prosody Transfer

Since the prosody of a spoken utterance carries information about its discourse function, salience, and speaker attitude, prosody mod- els and prosody generation modules have played a crucial part in text-to- speech (TTS) synthesis systems from the beginning, especially those set not only on sounding natural, but also on showing emotion or particular speaker intention. Prosody transfer within speech-to-speech translation is a recent research area with increasing importance, with one of its most important research topics being the detection and treatment of salient events, i.e. instances of prominence or focus which do not result from syn- tactic constraints, but are rather products of semantic or pragmatic level eects. This paper presents the design and the guidelines for the creation of a multilingual speech corpus containing prosodically rich sentences, ultimately aimed at training statistical prosody models for multilingual prosody transfer in the context of expressive speech synthesis

The Changing Landscape for Stroke\ua0Prevention in AF: Findings From the GLORIA-AF Registry Phase 2

Background GLORIA-AF (Global Registry on Long-Term Oral Antithrombotic Treatment in Patients with Atrial Fibrillation) is a prospective, global registry program describing antithrombotic treatment patterns in patients with newly diagnosed nonvalvular atrial fibrillation at risk of stroke. Phase 2 began when dabigatran, the first non\u2013vitamin K antagonist oral anticoagulant (NOAC), became available. Objectives This study sought to describe phase 2 baseline data and compare these with the pre-NOAC era collected during phase 1. Methods During phase 2, 15,641 consenting patients were enrolled (November 2011 to December 2014); 15,092 were eligible. This pre-specified cross-sectional analysis describes eligible patients\u2019 baseline characteristics. Atrial fibrillation disease characteristics, medical outcomes, and concomitant diseases and medications were collected. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics. Results Of the total patients, 45.5% were female; median age was 71 (interquartile range: 64, 78) years. Patients were from Europe (47.1%), North America (22.5%), Asia (20.3%), Latin America (6.0%), and the Middle East/Africa (4.0%). Most had high stroke risk (CHA2DS2-VASc [Congestive heart failure, Hypertension, Age  6575 years, Diabetes mellitus, previous Stroke, Vascular disease, Age 65 to 74 years, Sex category] score  652; 86.1%); 13.9% had moderate risk (CHA2DS2-VASc = 1). Overall, 79.9% received oral anticoagulants, of whom 47.6% received NOAC and 32.3% vitamin K antagonists (VKA); 12.1% received antiplatelet agents; 7.8% received no antithrombotic treatment. For comparison, the proportion of phase 1 patients (of N = 1,063 all eligible) prescribed VKA was 32.8%, acetylsalicylic acid 41.7%, and no therapy 20.2%. In Europe in phase 2, treatment with NOAC was more common than VKA (52.3% and 37.8%, respectively); 6.0% of patients received antiplatelet treatment; and 3.8% received no antithrombotic treatment. In North America, 52.1%, 26.2%, and 14.0% of patients received NOAC, VKA, and antiplatelet drugs, respectively; 7.5% received no antithrombotic treatment. NOAC use was less common in Asia (27.7%), where 27.5% of patients received VKA, 25.0% antiplatelet drugs, and 19.8% no antithrombotic treatment. Conclusions The baseline data from GLORIA-AF phase 2 demonstrate that in newly diagnosed nonvalvular atrial fibrillation patients, NOAC have been highly adopted into practice, becoming more frequently prescribed than VKA in Europe and North America. Worldwide, however, a large proportion of patients remain undertreated, particularly in Asia and North America. (Global Registry on Long-Term Oral Antithrombotic Treatment in Patients With Atrial Fibrillation [GLORIA-AF]; NCT01468701

An integrated framework of factors affecting energy-related user behaviour

The structure of this paper builds upon current knowledge in the area of energy use and the necessity to develop a holistic conceptual framework as a guide for a variety of energy-related behavior analyses. This research is based on a systematic overview of scientific literature with a focus on energy-related behavior. The main objective of this research was to identify factors affecting energy consumption and energy conservation patterns among users, as well as to reveal energy-related behavior presence in the scientific literature. The contribution of this paper comes from the new observation perspective with a unified and integrated framework of factors affecting energy-related user behavior. Therefore, the framework proposed in this paper combines relevant factors to achieve significant conclusions based on an analytical approach in terms of psychological and energy technology point of view. Lastly, the influencing factors were categorised into four main categories, namely socio-demographic, situational, and individual factors as well as previous experience

Performance Implications of Organizational and Technological Innovation: An Integrative Perspective

Manufacturing firms engage in various innovation activities to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage. Although technological innovation is considered one of the key performance drivers, organizational innovation has become increasingly prominent. This study analyzes the relationship between organizational and technological innovation and examines their effect on firm performance in the manufacturing context. The empirical evidence is based on the European Manufacturing Survey (EMS)—Serbian data set gathered in 2018. Hypotheses on the relationship between organizational and technological innovations and firm performance are tested by structural equation modeling using data from 240 Serbian manufacturing firms. The results have shown that technological concepts strongly mediate the impact of organizational factors on firm performance (return on sales—ROS). Moreover, it could be said that, in contrast to the individual approach, to foster a ROS, a synergic effect of organizational and technological concepts is needed, implying the need for an integrative perspective in the process of innovation