Dynamics of Corporate Venture Capital: Performance, Temporality, and Institution

Along with effective knowledge search and technology portfolio management, financing is an important facet of innovation management for established corporations and new enterprises alike. I study the organization and process of innovation financing in the corporate venture capital (CVC) context, which is a crucial form of interfirm equity relationship that facilitates corporate innovation by funding technological startups. This multi-method dissertation comprises three essays that jointly contribute to unpacking the dynamics and influence of resource interdependence between the corporate investor and invested venture during the CVC investment life cycle. First, I conduct a meta-analysis to unveil the link between CVC investments and various performance objectives of corporate investors and new ventures. I integrate performance measures into different conceptual categories, after which I theorize and confirm that the magnitude of CVC impact systematically differs across these categories due to heterogeneity in dependence absorption. I also find that corporate financial performance is supplemented by corporate strategic performance but attenuated by venture performance. Second, I take a closer look at the longitudinal evolution of the corporate strategic objective of technological learning, theorizing that it drives termination decisions in established CVC investments. I hypothesize that corporate strategic considerations co-evolve with the dynamics of interfirm technological dependency. In addition, this effect is conditional on the aggregate resource dependence level that can be altered by corporate exploration breadth, venture new technology, and dyadic similarity. Third, I explore the emergence of the CVC ecosystem in China and introduce a new motivation, corporate political objective, to the CVC literature that has so far neglected non-market incentives. Based on 11 interviews with elite informants and archival data, I follow a mixed-method approach that identifies the primary stakeholders and their corresponding roles in China’s CVC investment process, depicts the evolution of similarities and differences between the US and China’s CVC ecosystem, and articulates the existence and manifestation of the corporate political objective in CVC investments. Together, my findings across the three studies suggest that market and non-market objectives coexist with, and influence, each other in the process of the CVC investment life cycle, such that investment motivations and performance outcomes are based upon tradeoffs across interrelated objectives, time frames, and institutional contexts. This dissertation provides a conceptual framework and empirical foundation for the complex interaction between entrepreneurs and corporations in the CVC context to understand the interdependencies during innovation financing in a way that should prove meaningful to new venture funding, corporate entrepreneurship, investment for innovation, and resource dependency theory

Revisiting Grammatical Error Correction Evaluation and Beyond

Pretraining-based (PT-based) automatic evaluation metrics (e.g., BERTScore and BARTScore) have been widely used in several sentence generation tasks (e.g., machine translation and text summarization) due to their better correlation with human judgments over traditional overlap-based methods. Although PT-based methods have become the de facto standard for training grammatical error correction (GEC) systems, GEC evaluation still does not benefit from pretrained knowledge. This paper takes the first step towards understanding and improving GEC evaluation with pretraining. We first find that arbitrarily applying PT-based metrics to GEC evaluation brings unsatisfactory correlation results because of the excessive attention to inessential systems outputs (e.g., unchanged parts). To alleviate the limitation, we propose a novel GEC evaluation metric to achieve the best of both worlds, namely PT-M2 which only uses PT-based metrics to score those corrected parts. Experimental results on the CoNLL14 evaluation task show that PT-M2 significantly outperforms existing methods, achieving a new state-of-the-art result of 0.949 Pearson correlation. Further analysis reveals that PT-M2 is robust to evaluate competitive GEC systems. Source code and scripts are freely available at https://github.com/pygongnlp/PT-M2.Comment: Accepted to EMNLP 202

Two Antimycin A Analogues from Marine-Derived Actinomycete Streptomyces lusitanus

Two new antimycin A analogues, antimycin B1 and B2 (1–2), were isolated from a spent broth of a marine-derived bacterium, Streptomyces lusitanus. The structures of 1 and 2 were established on the basis of spectroscopic analyses and chemical methods. The isolated compounds were tested for their anti-bacterial potency. Compound 1 was found to be inactive against the bacteria Bacillus subtilis, Staphyloccocus aureus, and Loktanella hongkongensis. Compound 2 showed antibacterial activities against S. aureus and L. hongkongensis with MIC values of 32.0 and 8.0 μg/mL, respectively

Global cities and cultural diversity: challenges and opportunities for young people’s nutrition.

Childhood obesity is a common concern across global cities and threatens sustainable urban development. Initiatives to improve nutrition and encourage physical exercise are promising but are yet to exert significant influence on prevention. Childhood obesity in London is associated with distinct ethnic and socio-economic patterns. Ethnic inequalities in health-related behaviour endure, underpinned by inequalities in employment, housing, access to welfare services, and discrimination. Addressing these growing concerns requires a clearer understanding of the socio-cultural, environmental and economic contexts of urban living that promote obesity. We explore opportunities for prevention using asset based-approaches to nutritional health and well-being, with a particular focus on adolescents from diverse ethnic backgrounds living in London. We focus on the important role that community engagement and multi-sectoral partnership play in improving the nutritional outcomes of London's children. London's children and adolescents grow up in the rich cultural mix of a global city where local streets are characterised by diversity in ethnicities, languages, religions, foods, and customs, creating complex and fluid identities. Growing up with such everyday diversity we argue can enhance the quality of life for London's children and strengthen their social capital. The Determinants of young Adult Social well-being and Health longitudinal study of about 6500 of London's young people demonstrated the positive impact of cultural diversity. Born to parents from over a hundred countries and exposed to multi-lingual households and religious practices, they demonstrated strong psychological resilience and sense of pride from cultural straddling, despite material disadvantage and discrimination. Supporting the potential contribution of such socio-cultural assets is in keeping with the values of social justice and equitable and sustainable development. Our work signals the importance of community engagement and multisectoral partnerships, involving, for example, schools and faith-based organisations, to improve the nutrition of London's children

Shifting entrepreneurial landscape and development performance of water startups in emerging water markets.

Emerging technologies have driven the rise of many water-related startups and created new opportunities in water markets. The global water crisis could be mitigated by applying innovative technologies, sound water management decisions, and successful business models, and it is essential to better understand the status and future trends of emerging water markets. This study aims to discover shifts in the entrepreneurial landscape and evaluate water startups' development performance for the sustainable development of emerging water markets. We collected and analyzed data including the founding date, service area, service provided, details of funding raised, revenues, and consumer responses on 132 water startups founded between 2008 and 2018 in California, USA. Our results indicated that municipal area dominated the emerging water startup market compared to agricultural and industrial areas, and that many of the services provided shifted from conventional technologies to digital technologies. Though digital water startups' current revenues were relatively low, digital techniques applied in the water industry exhibited the good potential to promote public health and water saving. The development trends and performance of water startups enlighten the technological and commercial revolutions in the emerging water market, and provide guidelines for the decision-making in relevant stakeholders in the scientific, governmental, and industrial communities