Patents, Entrepreneurship and Performance

This paper provides an overview of a new database that uses intellectual property data to track the innovative activity of firms in the UK. The paper looks at the extent and nature of patenting activity, focusing on micro firms and SMEs. Over the period 2000 to 2007, SME patenting has increased whereas large firm patenting has fallen and micro firm patenting has been roughly con- stant. Most micro and SMEs patent while relatively young (aged ten or less) and this tendency is becoming more pronounced over time. The paper provides a descriptive analysis on micro firms and SMEs that become high growth firms (defined as having greater than 20 percent growth per annum). Overall, 28.0 percent of young micro and SMEs achieve high growth (over 2002 to 2007). In comparison, 29.4 percent of young micro or SMEs that patent achieve high growth. This difference is much greater for firms in the high-tech industries. Moreover, the analysis shows that due to the skewed nature of the firm-level growth distribution, standard conditional mean estimators may fail to uncover important differences in the association between patenting and firm growth across the conditional growth distribution.Firm growth, patents

Creating The Well-Rounded Student: The Merging of Experiential Learning, Civic Engagement & Media Practice

poster abstractMedia production courses often focus on the technical and artistic aspects of creating a project. Often, the passion to expose students to a real-world experience in a diverse environment is not considered. This poster will present two studies that involved forty-three students from two sections of a Computer Graphics Technology course. The students were placed in unfamiliar learning environments as a part of their second project in the course. The purpose for doing so was to provide an experiential learning experience, increase the students’ awareness of an unfamiliar, and oftentimes intimidating environment and providing them with a unique learning experience where they could develop their skills in video production and civic engagement. A survey was developed in partnership with the Office of Service & Learning. Results showed an increase in civic and diversity awareness that exposed the students to the world of video production in a new light

Developing Soft Skills with Interdisciplinary Teams in the First Year: Lessons Learned

The academic structure of most universities dictates that a student work with those of their own program and in conjunction with a program that is tangential to theirs. Interdisciplinary educational experiences that provide students with the opportunity to develop soft skills (such as communication, empathy and problem solving) are considered rare but are much more common in the working environment. As an example, working environments such as Universal Creative are comprised of multiple disciplines (i.e. civil engineer, mechanical engineering, illustration, user experience design, etc.) A function of working in an interdisciplinary team can also be to work on unknown or “wicked problem” that has no defined answer. This presentation will provide an overview of the Jag Challenge, an innovation sprint experience for incoming students to the university. Students work in teams of three as they are provided a challenge space, find specific problems within that space, conduct stakeholder interviews, develop empathy maps, ideate, conduct secondary interviews and then present their final solution. In Fall of 2019 over 210 incoming students participated from eight first year experience course sections. In 2020 over 350 students participated in a virtual or hybrid format of the Jag Challenge. While one section may be comprised of mostly engineering students or business students most sections were interdisciplinary (i.e. a nursing student working with an education student)

Combination of Donepezil and Memantine to Mitigate Electroconvulsive Therapy Induced Cognitive Effects

Electroconvulsive therapy is a procedure whereby patients have electricity delivered to their brain to induce a generalized seizure. Electroconvulsive therapy is highly efficacious in treating conditions such as major depressive disorder, but it can induce temporary cognitive deficits and memory loss. Studies suggest that medications used to slow Alzheimer’s disease may diminish these adverse effects, but we aim to determine whether donepezil and memantine combination therapy can prophylactically protect cognitive functioning and memory in patients receiving electroconvulsive therapy. Using a randomized control design, we assess patients with major depressive disorder before and after electroconvulsive therapy using a battery of cognition and memory tests, including the Columbia University Autobiographical Memory Interview – Short Form. Changes in these scores will be compared within and between patients taking combination therapy and placebo. This work will help improve our understanding of the effects of electroconvulsive therapy, and potentially help alleviate its adverse cognitive effects

Innovation and the survival of new firms across British regions

This paper analyses the survival of the complete cohort of more than 162,000 limited companies incorporated in Britain in 2001 over the subsequent five-year period. For this purpose, we estimate firms' hazards of failure and survival functions using nonparametric and semi-parametric techniques. The paper focuses on two important policy-related issues.The first is to what extent survival rates vary across regions in Britain. A second, and related, policy issue concerns innovation. The data available allows us to look at the intellectual property (IP) activity of all British firms, including that of the 162,000 new firms in 2001. The results indicate substantial differences in survival rates across regions, and also that IP activity is associated with a higher probability of survival. These differences across regions, and the importance of IP activity, remain when we condition on a large range of regional, industry and firm-level characteristics shifting firms' hazards of failure

Students Perceptions of an Alternative Testing Method: Hints as an Option for Exam Questions

In the Proceedings of the 2014 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition. Indianapolis, Indiana, June 15 – 18, 2014

Automated Hints on Quizzes: An Approach to Combined Learning and Evaluation

This paper describes and evaluates an approach to student assessment using Point Barter, an online quiz system that allows students to sacrifice partial credit in exchange for hints about the correct answer. In the Proceedings of the 2014 International Higher Education Teaching and Learning Association Conference. Anchorage, Alaska, May 31 to June 2, 2014

Developing a Just-in-Time Adaptive Mobile Platform for Family Medicine Education: Experiential Lessons Learned

EASEL is a platform designed to provide just-in-time adaptive support to students during experiential learning interviews conducted as part of required work in an online course in a family medicine education program in a Midwestern urban university setting EASEL considers the time and location of the student and provides questions and content before, during, and after the interviews take place EASEL will provide a new way to facilitate and support online family medicine students as they meet with patients and healthcare professionals This paper presents a look at the considerations, issues, and lessons learned during the development process of this interdisciplinary collaborative effort between the platform designers and family medicine faculty while working toward completion of the stud

Sylvicola cinctus (Fabricius), the Hawaiian Wood Gnat, with Notes on the Family (Diptera: Anisopodidae)

The Hawaiian Wood Gnat is identified as Sylvicola cinctus (Fabricius). The family Anisopodidae is reviewed, and key to World genera is presented. Male and female genitalia of S. cinctus, S. fenestralis and Anisopus fuscatus (two other species likely to occur in Hawaii) are figured