Procuring Innovation on Internet-Based Markets

The Internet-based market is rising as a viable venue for the procurement of innovation solutions. There are two major procurement mechanisms existing in the market practices: contest and RFP. We investigate the factors that affect a firm’s preference of one mechanism over the other. We divide innovation problems into two categories: exploitive innovation problem and exploratory innovation problem. For an exploitive innovation problem, technologies used in solutions already exist, and the outcome of the solution is determined by the type and the effort of a solver. For an exploratory problem, technologies are not available; solvers need to go through an exploratory process but the result of his effort is uncertain. We establish the boundary condition for solution seeker’s decision on procurement mechanism. For an exploitive innovation problem, RFP is preferred in an open-participation market unless the distribution of the solvers’ type has a big variance; for an explorative innovation problem, contest will be preferred in most cases except that the solver pool of the market is small. Moreover, the amount of a cash award, the effort coefficient, and the degree of the randomness endowed in a technology exploratory process all have effect on seekers’ decision

A Design Framework for Online Support Systems of E-Government in China

With development of e-government systems, there are many big changes in Chinese government’s efficiency. However, the SARS revealed low efficiency is still serious. After the analysis of the factors affected on the efficiency, we find that traditional DSS is hard to support decision maker and that online support systems may improve the officials’ work effectiveness better. Unfortunately, little attention has been given to the research. In this paper, we will discuss the cultural characteristics of Chinese government. And then, based on the theory of Time-based Competition in governmental workflow, we summarize the four characteristics of online support systems. Furthermore, we propose the design framework for online support systems (OSS) in context of e-government in China, which consists of three major parts: the single OSS, the collaborative OSS and the mobile OSS. Also the detailed function and procedure of the three parts are presented. Analysis shows that the OSS contributes to developing efficiency in the official decision making

The Janus Face of Cross-Platform Spillover: Who Reap the Benefits?

The booming of online platforms has attracted academia’s increasing interest in cross-platform spillover of product consumption. This study investigates how physicians’ content creation in Tik Tok influences patients’ demands, comments and satisfaction towards the physicians on online health communities (OHCs). Using the difference-in-differences approach, we uncover asymmetric influences of cross-platform spillovers for high- and low-awareness physicians in Tik Tok. Specifically, low-awareness physicians do not enjoy the benefits (i.e., the increased volume of orders and comments on OHC) from content creation in Tik Tok, but their ratings turn to decline due to attention distraction caused by cross-platform activities. Conversely, for high-awareness physicians, we find a positive cross-platform spillover effect for orders and comments on OHC without decreasing their ratings. Despite the existence of attention distraction from cross-platform services for high-awareness physicians, the negative impact on feedbacks is offset by higher ratings from their cross-platform consumers

The Allocation of Prizes in Crowdsourcing Contests

A unique characteristic of crowdsourcing contest is the coexistence of multiple contests and each individual contestant strategically chooses the contest that maximizes his/her expected gain. The competition between contests for contestants significantly changes the optimal allocation of prizes for contest organizers. We show that the contestants with higher ability prefer to single-prize contests while those with lower ability prefer to multiple-prize contests, which makes single-prize contest is no longer the optimal choice for organizers as it was in the context of a single contest. We demonstrate that the organizers may allocate multiple prizes whether they intent to maximize total efforts or highest efforts, and presents the condition under which the multiple-prize approach will be optimal

Research on Policies to Support Telecommuting in China

Telecommuting (or Telework) is now relaxing more and more workers from traditional 9-to-5 routines in many countries. In this paper, we do some research on China’s actuality, and try to give out some reasonable suggestions to support Telecommuting, on the basis of learning from the developed countries

Turning Unstructured and Incoherent Group Discussion into DATree: A TBL Coherence Analysis Approach

Despite the rapid growth of user-generated unstructured text from online group discussions, business decision-makers are facing the challenge of understanding its highly incoherent content. Coherence analysis attempts to reconstruct the order of discussion messages. However, existing methods only focus on system and cohesion features. While they work with asynchronous discussions, they fail with synchronous discussions because these features rarely appear. We believe that discussion logic features play an important role in coherence analysis. Therefore, we propose a TCA method for coherence analysis, which is composed of a novel message similarity measure algorithm, a subtopic segmentation algorithm and a TBL-based classification algorithm. System, cohesion and discussion logic features are all incorporated into our TCA method. Results from experiments showed that the TCA method achieved significantly better performance than existing methods. Furthermore, we illustrate that the DATree generated by the TCA method can enhance decision-makers’ content analysis capability

An Empirical Research of the Network Public Opinion Impact on the Information Openness of Government Affairs – Take “Hide and Seek” and “Deng Yujiao” Events for Example

The influence network public opinion on the information openness of government affairs is studied after comparing the events of hide-and-seek and Deng Yujiao . The linear dependence relationship exists between variation of information publicity about government affairs and the total number of the network public opinion, moreover, variation of information publicity about government affairs and the ratio that negative comments in total number of the network public opinion presences linear relation. Both total number and negative comment ratio play an improving role in the process of e-government publicly: total number and degree of e-government information openness exists stable positive correlation, while the positive correlation relationship between negative comments ratio and e-government information openness is instability

Tunable broadband photoluminescence from bismuth‐doped calcium aluminum germanate glasses prepared in oxidizing atmosphere

Tunable photoluminescence (PL) from transparent inorganic glass matrices is of interest for applications demanding a semitransparent photoconverter that does not elastically scatter incoming light. For this purpose, bismuth (Bi)‐doped optical materials exhibit unique spectral characteristics in terms of bandwidth and emission tunability. Here, we demonstrate a facile route for preparing such converters from Bi‐doped calcium‐aluminate and calcium‐aluminogermanate glasses. These glasses offer tunable PL across the near violet and visible‐to‐near‐infrared (NIR) spectral range, with an emission lifetime in the range of 300 μs. The addition of GeO 2 exerts a decrease in optical basicity, which in turn enables the stabilization of NIR‐active low‐valence Bi species for broadband NIR PL

Trends for nanotechnology development in China, Russia, and India

China, Russia, and India are playing an increasingly important role in global nanotechnology research and development (R&D). This paper comparatively inspects the paper and patent publications by these three countries in the Thomson Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI) database and United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) database (1976–2007). Bibliographic, content map, and citation network analyses are used to evaluate country productivity, dominant research topics, and knowledge diffusion patterns. Significant and consistent growth in nanotechnology papers are noted in the three countries. Between 2000 and 2007, the average annual growth rate was 31.43% in China, 11.88% in Russia, and 33.51% in India. During the same time, the growth patterns were less consistent in patent publications: the corresponding average rates are 31.13, 10.41, and 5.96%. The three countries’ paper impact measured by the average number of citations has been lower than the world average. However, from 2000 to 2007, it experienced rapid increases of about 12.8 times in China, 8 times in India, and 1.6 times in Russia. The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS), and the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) were the most productive institutions in paper publication, with 12,334, 6,773, and 1,831 papers, respectively. The three countries emphasized some common research topics such as “Quantum dots,” “Carbon nanotubes,” “Atomic force microscopy,” and “Scanning electron microscopy,” while Russia and India reported more research on nano-devices as compared with China. CAS, RAS, and IIT played key roles in the respective domestic knowledge diffusion