Social Contexts in Team Formation: Why Do Independent Start-Ups and University Spin-Offs Form Teams Differently?

Although the entrepreneurial team has gained increasing attention as a unit of analysis, we still do not understand much about how these teams form. Previous research has focused either on existing social relationships and their role in the search for potential team members or on criteria for selecting team members. Consequently, we do not yet understand the interplay of search and selection. Another long-neglected aspect that is being increasingly recognized in entrepreneurship research is that the entrepreneurial process is influenced by its social context beyond existing social relationships. This social context is another important factor that has to be considered to properly understand team formation. To analyze how specific characteristics of one particularly relevant social context – namely, the entrepreneurial field – impact the search for and selection of team members, I conducted a qualitative, multiple-case study that compares innovative new ventures in Berlin. The study shows that different types of ventures in different phases exhibit different team formation patterns based on their different and changing social contexts. From these patterns, I have derived different team-formation mechanisms and propositions about the conditions under which they apply

C# 3.0 makes OCL redundant!

Other than its 'platform independence' the major advantages of OCL over traditional Object Oriented programming languages has been the declarative nature of the language, its powerful navigation facility via the iteration operations, and the availability of tuples as a first class concept. The recent offering from Microsoft of the "Orcas" version of Visual Studio with C# 3.0 and the Linq library provides functionality almost identical to that of OCL. This paper examines and evaluates the controversial thesis that, as a result of C# 3.0, OCL is essentially redundant, having been superseded by the incorporation of its advantageous features into a mainstream programming language

Did COVID lockdowns harm entrepreneurship? Not exactly

The prevalent view is that COVID lockdowns have severely harmed entrepreneurship, but have they? Gorgi Krlev, Katharina Scheidgen, Franziska Günzel-Jensen, Miriam Wolf, and Ali Aslan Gümüsay write that physical distancing created new digital spaces and led to unconventional ways of integrating new people, new products, and new purpose into entrepreneurship. They observed instances in which entrepreneurs opened their mind in fundamental ways to provide services which deviated clearly from their original mission

optimade-python-tools: a Python library for serving and consuming materials data via OPTIMADE APIs

In recent decades, improvements in algorithms, hardware, and theory have enabled crystalline materials to be studied computationally at the atomistic level with great accuracy and speed. To enable dissemination, reproducibility, and reuse, many digital crystal structure databases have been created and curated, ready for comparison with existing infrastructure that stores structural characterizations (e.g., diffraction) of real crystals. Each database will typically have a bespoke, stateless, web-based Application Programming Interface (API); users can submit a query via specially-crafted URLs. Such esoteric and specialized APIs incur maintenance and usability costs upon both the data providers and consumers, who may not be software specialists. The OPTIMADE API specification (Andersen et al., 2020, 2021), released in July 2020, aimed to reduce these costs by designing a common API for use across a consortium of collaborating materials databases and beyond. Whilst based on the robust JSON:API standard (Katz et al., 2015), the OPTIMADE API specification presents several domain-specific features and re- quirements that can be tricky to implement for non-specialist teams. The repository presented here, optimade-python-tools, provides a modular reference server implementation and a set of associated tools to accelerate the development process for data providers, toolmakers and end-user

Teaching computer language handling - From compiler theory to meta-modelling

Most universities teach computer language handling by mainly focussing on compiler theory, although MDA (model-driven architecture) and meta-modelling are increasingly important in the software industry as well as in computer science. In this article, we investigate how traditional compiler theory compares to meta-modelling with regard to formally defining the different aspects of a language, and how we can expand the focus in computer language handling courses to also include meta-model-based approaches. We give an outline of a computer language handling course that covers both paradigms, and share some experiences from running a course based on this outline at the University of Agder

Market Dependency as Boundary for Solidarity

Der Beitrag untersucht Grenzlinien der Solidarität. Er betrachtet, wie in Krisensituationen Unterstützungsbedarfe für jene soziale Gruppen verhandelt werden, die in etablierten Solidaritätsdiskursen in eine Deutungslücke fallen. Untersuchungsgegenstand bildet die öffentliche Verhandlung von Solidarität mit Soloselbstständigen zu Beginn der Coronapandemie. Gestützt auf Auswertungen von 21 qualitativen Interviews und ein Textkorpus mit 2428 Zeitungsartikeln zeichnen wir den Diskurs um Soforthilfe nach. Mittels einer Kombination aus strukturierender Inhaltsanalyse und Textmining zeigen wir auf, dass die Deutungsfigur der Marktabhängigkeit von Soloselbstständigen in dieser Krisenzeit dazu dient, die Hilfsbedürftigkeit der Gruppe zu identifizieren (soziale Grenzziehung), aber auch die Ausgestaltung der Hilfe kontrovers zu diskutieren (substanzielle Grenzziehung). Wir zeigen, wie sich Solidaritätsnormen im Diskursverlauf konfigurieren und dabei Marktabhängigkeit als relevante Grenze für Solidarität freigeben, diese aber nur zeitlich begrenzt wirksam bleibt.This article asks how boundaries of solidarity are constructed. From a sociological perspective, solo self-employed workers, who are both employees and entrepreneurs, fall into a collective interpretation gap in the discourse on solidarity. However, this changes at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. Drawing on the analyses of 21 qualitative interviews and a text corpus of 2428 newspaper articles, we trace the public discourse on “Soforthilfe.” Using a combination of structuring content analysis and text mining, we show that the market dependency of the solo self-employed serves to identify the group’s need for financial support (social boundary), but also to controversially discuss the design of this support (substantive boundary). We show how norms of solidarity are configured throughout the discourse, releasing market dependence as a relevant boundary for solidarity – at least temporarily

Enabling the Collaborative Definition of DSMLs

International audienceSoftware development processes are collaborative in nature. Neglecting the key role of end-users leads to software that does not satisfy their needs. This collaboration becomes specially important when creating Domain-Specific Modeling Languages (DSMLs), which are (modeling) languages specifically designed to carry out the tasks of a particular domain. While end-users are actually the experts of the domain for which a DSML is developed, their participation in the DSML specification process is still rather limited nowadays. In this paper we propose a more community-aware language development process by enabling the active participation of all community members (both developers and end-users of the DSML) from the very beginning. Our proposal is based on a DSML itself, called Collaboro, which allows representing change proposals on the DSML design and discussing (and tracing back) possible solutions, comments and decisions arisen during the collaboration