Communicating values: essays on trust and legitimacy as dynamic drivers of decision-making in crowdfunding

There is great consensus among scholars and practitioners alike that entrepreneurs and young ventures play an important role in tackling societal issues. Despite this, such ventures with their overarching social or environmental mission face grave difficulties when it comes to accessing external finance. This may be due to their complex value-propositions that bring with a narrative outside the traditional lines of investor/investee communication, and of course their increased liability of newness (Stinchcombe, 1965) because of novel forms of organisations with strong stakeholder participation in their governance. Crowdfunding (CF) can be seen as a fairly young financing option that aims to bridge this financing gap. It does so by focusing investors on the value-propositions of the ventures such that it connects the fund-seeking venture to the community. Because of these peculiarities it is crucial to understand how decision-making and underlying communication processes work as they are more strongly underpinned by collective and individual values. And while research has shed light on the factors that influence decision-making processes, much less attention has been paid to the communication and negotiation of the underlying values of the various actors in these processes. This thesis, in the form of a PhD by Public Works, fills this gap and provides insights into how the communication and negotiation of values between the actors influences decision-making in CF throughout the various stages of a funding campaign. It summarises and outlines five scholarly papers which address CF as an institutional space with interlinked actors and looks at decision-making processes from sociological and socio-cognitive perspectives, applying legitimacy and trust lenses. Given the nascent status of CF theory the research positions itself in an interpretative paradigm and follows an abductive methodology with qualitative methods. Based on the combined insights from the five papers the thesis ultimately provides insights into the processes of embedding and re-embedding of values in CF and by that how these values drive decision-making

Crowdfunding revisited: a neo-institutional field-perspective

Crowdfunding, which relies on the aggregated financial power of the many non-institutionalised individuals, who pledge small amounts is seen in the literature as a particularly well-suited form of entrepreneurial finance. A reason for this may be that the investment decisions are more based on the value propositions of a venture than on purely financial factors. Yet, the communication and translation of the value propositions of a venture into various cultural and regulatory contexts requires specialised services and joint efforts. These services are enabled by so-called Crowdfunding Platforms (CFPs) which provide the necessary tools and services. However, they also influence and potentially limit the field through their actions. Applying an institutional field-perspective in order to gain more holistic insights on the interplay between structure and agents, we revise the originally proposed model developed in our 2013 article in Venture Capital based on an extensive update of the literature and provide new insights from additional empirical cases to triangulate the recent scholarly contributions. We finally enhance theory on crowdfunding on an institutional field-level with a better conceptualization of the interconnectedness between actors and their activities, as well as their positions and links within the structure and crowdfunding platforms as powerful central actors

Financing Cleantech SME innovation: setting an agenda

The need for a clear research and policy agenda to assist early stage Cleantech financing has never been greater. These businesses may hold important keys to unlocking vital globally game changing technologies to tackle climate change. The paper provides an overview of recent academic literature and proposes a research agenda for early stage Cleantech SME finance. With growing interest in how to support innovations that tackle the climate emergency, there is a need for evidence that can assist the private sector, civil society organizations and policymakers in finding more effective ways to encourage impact investing and other finance for early stage Cleantech SMEs. This research agenda will therefore contribute to sustainability transitions in key sectors and the development of a sustainable low carbon economy

Dependence on plasma shape and plasma fueling for small edge-localized mode regimes in TCV and ASDEX Upgrade

Within the EUROfusion MST1 work package, a series of experiments has been conducted on AUG and TCV devices to disentangle the role of plasma fueling and plasma shape for the onset of small ELM regimes. On both devices, small ELM regimes with high confinement are achieved if and only if two conditions are fulfilled at the same time. Firstly, the plasma density at the separatrix must be large enough (n e,sep/n G ∼ 0.3), leading to a pressure profile flattening at the separatrix, which stabilizes type-I ELMs. Secondly, the magnetic configuration has to be close to a double null (DN), leading to a reduction of the magnetic shear in the extreme vicinity of the separatrix. As a consequence, its stabilizing effect on ballooning modes is weakened

Quality of life after aortic valve repair is similar to Ross patients and superior to mechanical valve replacement: A cross-sectional study

Background: In patients after aortic valve surgery, the quality of life is hypothesized to be influenced by the type of the valve procedure. A cross-sectional study on the postoperative quality of life was carried out in patients after aortic valve-sparing surgery (with regards to the age of the patient), Ross procedure and mechanical aortic valve replacement. Methods: Quality of life was studied in 139 patients after aortic valve surgery divided into four study groups (Y - aortic valve-sparing procedure at the age below 50years, mean age 36.2years; O - aortic valve-sparing procedure at the age 50years and over, mean age 59.2years; R - Ross procedure, mean age 37.8years and M - mechanical aortic valve replacement at the age below 50years, mean age 39.2years). SF-36 Short Form and valve-specific questionnaires were mailed to the patients after 6months or later following surgery (median 26.9months). Results: In SF-36, the younger aortic valve repair patients and the Ross patients scored significantly better in 4 of 4 physical subscales and in 2 of 4 mental subscales than the older aortic valve repair and mechanical valve replacement patients. In the valve-specific questionnaire; however, all 3 groups free of anticoagulation (Y, O, and R) displayed greater freedom from negative valve-related concerns. Conclusions: Postoperative quality of life is influenced by the type of aortic valve procedure and is negatively linked with mechanical prosthesis implantation and long-term anticoagulation. Aortic valve-sparing strategy should be considered in cases with suitable valve morphology due to favorable clinical results and beneficial impact on the long-term quality of life

HIV Activates the Tyrosine Kinase Hck to Secrete ADAM Protease-Containing Extracellular Vesicles

HIV-Nef activates the myeloid cell-typical tyrosine kinase Hck, but its molecular role in the viral life cycle is not entirely understood. We found that HIV plasma extracellular vesicles (HIV pEV) containing/10 proteases and Nef also harbor Hck, and analyzed its role in the context of HIV pEV secretion. Myeloid cells required Hck for the vesicle-associated release of ADAM17. This could be induced by the introduction of Nef and implied that HIV targeted Hck for vesicle-associated ADAM17 secretion from a myeloid compartment. The other contents of HIV-pEV, however, including miRNA and effector protein profiles, as well as the presence of haptoglobin suggested hepatocytes as a possible cellular source. HIV liver tissue analysis supported this assumption, revealing induction of Hck translation, evidence for ADAMprotease activation and HIV infection. Our findings suggest that HIV targets Hck to induce pro-inflammatory vesicles release and identifies hepatocytes as a possible host cell compartment. (c) 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license.Peer reviewe

I-mode pedestal relaxation events at ASDEX Upgrade

The I-mode confinement regime can feature small edge temperature drops that can lead to an increase in the energy deposited onto the divertor targets. In this work, we show that these events are associated with a relaxation of both electron temperature and density edge profiles, with the largest drop found at the pedestal top position. The relative energy loss is about 1 %, and is thus lower than that of type-I ELMs for the same pedestal top collisionality. Stability analysis of edge profiles reveals that the operational points are far from the ideal peeling-ballooning boundary. Also, we show that these events appear close to the H-mode transition in the typical I-mode operational space in ASDEX Upgrade, and that no further enhancement of energy confinement is found when they occur. Moreover, scrape-off layer transport during these events is found to be very similar to type-I ELMs, with regard to timescales (≈ 800 µs), filament propagation, toroidally asymmetric energy effluxes at the midplane and asymmetry between inner and outer divertor deposited energy. In particular, the latter reveals that more energy reaches the outer divertor target. Lastly, first measurements of the divertor peak energy fluence are reported, and projections to ARC—a reactor that could potentially operate in I-mode—are drawn.EUROfusion Consortium Grant Agreement No. 63305

Effect of different contact formulations used in commercial FEM software packages on the results of hot forging simulations

Commercial FEM-software packages are widely used in the industry to predict material flow, temperaturedistribution and die load during the forging process. Contact in conjunction with plastic material behaviour,which is typical for forging simulations, leads to highly nonlinear equations in the FEM algorithms, whichmay cause problems in numerical convergence. Some FEM software providers handle this problem byautomatic contact damping or similar algorithms. However, the user has mostly no detailed information aboutadjustments and prediction accuracy. The only possibility for the user to have an impact on the contactbehaviour is to set a friction factor and to choose a friction model (e.g. Coloumb or Shear) appropriate to theinvestigated process. Friction factors are often measured by standard tests like the ring compression test whichshould be valid for all used software packages. In this paper a benchmark between three software programs isperformed based on a model for ring compression tests under typical hot forging conditions. The commercialFEM-software programs Deform2D, Forge2007 and Abaqus are compared by generating a nomogram for eachsoftware package. For all simulations identical physical (temperature, flow curves etc.) as well as numericalinfluence parameters are used. The simulations show a significant divergence in the results depending on theused FEM-software. This leads to the conclusion that a friction coefficient which is true for one softwarepackage can not be transferred directly into another one