How firms can overcome market-based innovation barriers

How do firms overcome market-based innovation barriers and improve their innovations’ performance? Until now, research took either a ‘mindset’ or an ‘action’ perspective. Sebastian Szambelan, Jiang Dragon Yi, and René Mauer investigate how both mindsets and actions can help firms overcome innovation barriers

Refugees as entrepreneurs: what’s behind their success or failure?

From brainwave to fruition, a successful entrepreneurial journey is theoretically determined by social networks and cognitive abilities. But how can entrepreneurial success be explained in the case of refugees, who leave everything (including human ties) behind, and whose skills don’t necessarily apply in their host countries? Yi Dragon Jiang, Caroline Straub, Kim Klyver, and René Mauer explain why some refugees still manage to create businesses and explore the specific ways in which they navigate the entrepreneurial process

Unfolding refugee entrepreneurs' opportunity-production process — Patterns and embeddedness

We observe the opportunity-production processes of aspiring refugee entrepreneurs in their host countries. Our process data from eighteen refugee entrepreneurs reveal heterogeneity in how entrepreneurs move across the opportunity-production stages of conceptualization, objectification, and enactment. We identify four patterns, which are characterized by differences in iteration, order, and continuity. By theorizing on process characteristics and connecting these characteristics to embeddedness and temporality, we provide insights into how cognitive alignment and use of networks from home countries versus host countries help expand the explanatory scope of the opportunity-production theory from ordinary entrepreneurs to entrepreneurs who are subject to disruption in their lives

Mouse dyskerin mutations affect accumulation of telomerase RNA and small nucleolar RNA, telomerase activity, and ribosomal RNA processing

Dyskerin is a nucleolar protein present in small nucleolar ribonucleoprotein particles that modify specific uridine residues of rRNA by converting them to pseudouridine. Dyskerin is also a component of the telomerase complex. Point mutations in the human gene encoding dyskerin cause the skin and bone marrow failure syndrome dyskeratosis congenita (DC). To test the extent to which disruption of pseudouridylation or telomerase activity may contribute to the pathogenesis of DC, we introduced two dyskerin mutations into murine embryonic stem cells. The A353V mutation is the most frequent mutation in patients with X-linked DC, whereas the G402E mutation was identified in a single family. The A353V, but not the G402E, mutation led to severe destabilization of telomerase RNA, a reduction in telomerase activity, and a significant continuous loss of telomere length with increasing numbers of cell divisions during in vitro culture. Both mutations caused a defect in overall pseudouridylation and a small but detectable decrease in the rate of pre-rRNA processing. In addition, both mutant embryonic stem cell lines showed a decrease in the accumulation of a subset of H/ACA small nucleolar RNAs, correlating with a significant decrease in site-specific pseudouridylation efficiency. Interestingly, the H/ACA snoRNAs decreased in the G402E mutant cell line differed from those affected in A353V mutant cells. Hence, our findings show that point mutations in dyskerin may affect both the telomerase and pseudouridylation pathways and the extent to which these functions are altered can vary for different mutations