Role of industrial linkages in stimulating innovation activity of medium-high and high technology enterprises in Poland

Prezentowane badanie dotyczy innowacji wśród przedsiębiorstw średniowysokiej i wysokiej techniki, charakteryzuje innowacje na poziomie firmy i uwzględnia dyfuzję do poziomu „nowość dla firmy”. Działania innowacyjne podzielono na trzy grupy, obejmujące: (1) nakłady na badania i rozwój oraz inwestycje w dotychczas niestosowane środki trwałe, w tym: a) budynki, lokale i grunty, b) maszyny i urządzenia techniczne, c) oprogramowanie komputerowe; (2) implementacje nowych wyrobów i procesów technologicznych oraz (3) współpracę innowacyjną. Badanie obejmuje 1 355 przedsiębiorstw przemysłowych. Część metodyczna analiz wykorzystuje modelowanie probitowe, dzięki któremu można określić szansę zajścia wybranego działania innowacyjnego w zależności od rodzaju i liczby tworzonych powiązań przemysłowych oraz przynależności do łańcucha dostaw.The paper presents the results of a study undertaken to determine the effect of the number of industrial vertical linkages and their participation in the supply chain on the innovation activity of medium-high and high technology industries in Poland. The main research hypothesis is that innovation processes in the group of enterprises representing both MHT and HT industries are strongly determined by the intensity and nature of the linkages and being part of the supply chain. The scope of the survey covers innovation in medium-high and high-technology sectors, concerns innovation at the firm level, and takes into account the diffusion of the “new to the company” category. Innovative activities are divided into three general groups including: (1) expenditure on research and development, and investments in fixed assets not used so far, such as a) buildings, premises and land, b) machinery and equipment, c) computer software; (2) implementation of new products and processes, and (3) innovative collaboration. The survey covers 1,355 industrial enterprises. The methodological part of the study uses probit modeling that enables the author to identify the probability of occurrence of innovation activity.Uniwersytet Zielonogórski, Wydział Ekonomii i ZarządzaniaAhuja G., Collaboration networks, structural holes, and innovation: a longitudinal study, “Administrative Science Quarterly” 2000, No. 45.Baum J. A. C., Calabrese T., Silverman B. S., Don’t go it alone: alliance network composition and startups’ performance in Canadian biotechnology, “Strategic Management Journal” 2000, No. 21.Chang S. et al., Supplier involvement and manufacturing flexibility, “Technovation” 2006, No. 26.Christensen C. M., Bower J. L., Customer power, strategic investment, and the failure of leading firms, “Strategic Management Journal” 1996, No. 17.Cooper M. C., Douglas M. L., Pagh J. D., Supply Chain Management: More Than a New Name for Logistics, “The International Joumal of Logistics Management” 1997, Vol. 8, No. 1Granovetter, M. S., The strength of weak ties, “American Journal Sociology” 1973, Vol. 78 (6).Granovetter M. S., The strength of weak ties: a network theory revisited, “Sociological Theory” 1983, Vol. 1.Hippel E. von, The Sources of Innovation, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1988.Maddala G. S., Ekonometria, Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, Warszawa 2006.McEvily B., Zaheer A., Bridging ties: a source of firm heterogeneity in competitive capabilities, “Strategic Management Journal” 1999, No. 20.Owen-Smith J., Powell W. W., Knowledge networks as channels and conduits: the effects of spillovers in the Boston biotechnology community, “Organization Science” 2004, No. 15.Stanisz A., Przystępny kurs statystki, t. 2, Statsoft, Kraków 2007.Świadek A., Determinanty aktywności innowacyjnej w regionalnych systemach przemysłowych w Polsce, Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Szczecińskiego, Szczecin 2008.Welfe A., Ekonometria, PWE, Warszawa 1998.Wspomaganie procesów decyzyjnych. Ekonometria, M. Lipiec-Zajchowska (red.), Wydawnictwo C.H. Beck, Warszawa 2003.Wynstra J. Y. F., Purchasing involvement in product development. Doctoral Thesis, Eindhoven Centre for Innovation Studies, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven 1998.15817

Regionalna polityka innowacyjna w świetle instytucjonalnych teorii rozwoju regionalnego

Regional innovation policy in the light of institutional theory of regional developmentThe purpose of this article is to show the potential behaviors of local governments, which stimulate the development of innovative business activities based on a specific set of institutional theories of regional development. The basic hypothesis of the research assumes that the regional authorities should actively formulate regional innovation policy, and then implement it

Pegvisomant therapy in acromegalic patient resistant to other treatment: case report

Introduction: Acromegaly is a chronic, rare disorder resulting from growth hormone (GH) hypersecretion, usually caused by a pituitary adenoma. GH stimulates synthesis of insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1), whom assay should be used as a screening test whenever acromegaly is suspected. Patients with acromegaly normally take from 5 to 10 years to receive a correct diagnosis, leading to complications such as cardiovascuar, respiratory, and endocrine problems that are responsible for an increase mortality. Late diagnosis of the disease also impact the effectiveness of surgical, pharmacological and radiotherapy treatment.    Case report: A 33-year-old acromegalic man with pituitary macroadenoma resistant to therapy of somastatin analogue (octreotide, lanreotide) and dopamine agonist (cabergoline). The patient underwent transsphenoidal adenomectomy, after wich high level of GH and IGF-1 were still measured. Due to the lack of the effect of the current treatment, the patient was qualified for pegvisomant therapy, as a result of which biochemical control was achieved without adverse events and with a good compliance of treatment.    Conclusions: Treatment with pegvisomant is now an important therapeutic strategy to achieve full disease control in acromegalic patients resistant or poorly responders to first generation somatostatin receptor ligands and in patients who do not respond adequately to selective excision of pituitary adenoma and /or for whom surgery is not possible

Complex treatment of invasive corticotropic pituitary macroadenoma - Case report

Introduction: Cushing's disease is a hypercortisolemic state caused by the excess secretion of corticotropin by the pituitary adenoma. Cushing's disease is diagnosed on the basis of clinical and laboratory signs of hypercortisolemia and the presence of an MRI pituitary adenoma. Pituitary surgery represents the first-line therapy, but it is non-curative in one third of patients, requiring additional treatments. Second-line treatments include pharmacotherapy, pituitary radiotherapy and bilateral adrenalectomy. Case report: A 57-year-old patient with clinical symptoms of hypercortisolemia was admitted to the Endocrinology Clinic due to dizziness and headache. Laboratory tests and MRI confirmed Cushing's disease caused by invasive pituitary macroadenoma. The tumor was not completely resected through the sphenoid sinus. Disease symptoms were remitted and hormone levels were stabilized. After 2 years, the underlying disease was relapsed. A second tumor removal operation was performed. The tumor was incompletely removed. The disease has progressed.. The patient was referred for stereotaxic CyberKnife radiotherapy. Conclusion: Cushing's disease should be diagnosed and treated in a specialized endocrinology center, and the success of treatment depends on a multidisciplinary team of physicians consisting of an endocrinologist, neurosurgeon and neuroradiologist.About 50% of untreated patients die within 5 years of the disease due to complications of hypercortisolemia. Surgical treatment is effective in the case of microadenomas, while in the case of macroadenomas, it may turn out to be ineffective when the tumor is highly invasive. If subsequent surgeries are unsuccessful, treatment with radiotherapy or pharmacotherapy should be given

Efficacy and safety of fenfluramine in the treatment of Dravet syndrome - literature review

Dravet Syndrome is a severe, drug-resistant, and rare epileptiform disorder that is typically presented in the first year of life in an otherwise healthy child. It is characterized by prolonged seizures that are often resistant to current anti-epileptic drug regimens, which made them poorly controlled, and almost 50% of patients experience at least four tonic-clonic seizures per month. There are three new medicines: stiripentol, cannabidiol, and fenfluramine, with documented efficacy and safety as adjunctive therapies in pharmacoresistant Dravet syndrome treatment. This study aimed to assess the efficacy and safety of fenfluramine in the treatment of Dravet syndrome. Our study material consisted of publications, which were found in PubMed, Google Scholar, and Embase databases. In order to find the proper publications, the search has been conducted with the use of a combination of keywords like: “fenfluramine”, “Dravet syndrome”, “epilepsy treatment”, “Dravet syndrome pediatric patients”. The first step was to find proper publications from the last 10 years. The second step was to carry out an overview of the found publications. Results of mentioned studies proved that in Dravet syndrome, fenfluramine provided a significantly greater reduction in convulsive seizure frequency compared with placebo. No patient developed valvular heart disease or pulmonary arterial hypertension, the side effects that occurred during its use were mild and the drug was generally well-tolerated. The bioequivalence and tolerability of single oral doses of fenfluramine hydrochloride oral solution in the fed and fasted states support drug administration without regard to meals. Fenfluramine may represent a new important treatment option for Dravet syndrome

Information Retrieval for ZeroSpeech 2021: The Submission by University of Wroclaw

We present a number of low-resource approaches to the tasks of the Zero Resource Speech Challenge 2021. We build on the unsupervised representations of speech proposed by the organizers as a baseline, derived from CPC and clustered with the k-means algorithm. We demonstrate that simple methods of refining those representations can narrow the gap, or even improve upon the solutions which use a high computational budget. The results lead to the conclusion that the CPC-derived representations are still too noisy for training language models, but stable enough for simpler forms of pattern matching and retrieval.Comment: Published in Interspeech 202

Aligned Contrastive Predictive Coding

We investigate the possibility of forcing a self-supervised model trained using a contrastive predictive loss to extract slowly varying latent representations. Rather than producing individual predictions for each of the future representations, the model emits a sequence of predictions shorter than that of the upcoming representations to which they will be aligned. In this way, the prediction network solves a simpler task of predicting the next symbols, but not their exact timing, while the encoding network is trained to produce piece-wise constant latent codes. We evaluate the model on a speech coding task and demonstrate that the proposed Aligned Contrastive Predictive Coding (ACPC) leads to higher linear phone prediction accuracy and lower ABX error rates, while being slightly faster to train due to the reduced number of prediction heads.Comment: Published in Interspeech 202

Product and process innovation patterns in Polish low and high technology systems

Research background: While the Sectoral Innovation System (SSI) anticipates technology-related similarities in innovation patterns in the same sectors across countries, the distance to the frontier suggests that there are important differences with respect to the level of national technological development. Most contemporary analyses of sectoral innovation systems are focused on well-developed economies. In contrast, the evidence from developing countries including new EU members are scared and lack dynamics. Purpose of the article: The purpose of this paper is to identify and compare product and process innovation patterns in Polish low and high technology systems. The main assumption is that divergence and convergence in innovation patterns of low- and medium-low technology (LMT) and high technology (HT) systems evolve over time and are strongly influenced by the characteristics of firms, their linkages with other system participants, existing demand, and institutional conditions. Methods: According to the third edition of the Oslo Manual (OECD, 2005), we employ a harmonized questionnaire and methodology to collect unique micro data on innovation.  The survey concerns 5252 firms including 873 firms from HT sector. The scope of the research relates to product and process innovation at least new to the firm. Findings & value added: Our results show that although the intensity of product and process innovation is higher in HT system, both business support institutions and public financial instruments better support firms in LMT sectors. On the other hand, existing demand and market structure favor the emergence of new innovations at the firm level (imitations), but with more emphasis on LMT. The key source of innovation is suppliers, with foreign suppliers in HT and national ones in LMT. In contrast to leading economies, LMT plays a key role in long term economic growth in Poland

The role of industry linkages in stimulating innovation activity of medium-high and high technology enterprises

Artykuł przedstawia wyniki badania, którego celem jest porównanie wpływu liczebności pionowych powiązań przemysłowych oraz przynależności do łańcucha dostaw na aktywność innowacyjną przemysłu średnio wysokiej i wysokiej techniki w Polsce. Celem drugorzędnym jest ustalenie, czy i w jaki sposób wzrost techniki przyczynia się do zmiany charakteru badanego wpływu. Hipotezą badawczą jest założenie, że procesy innowacyjne występujące w przemyśle średnio wysokiej i wysokiej techniki są silnie zdeterminowane intensywnością i charakterem tworzonych związków i przynależnością do łańcucha dostaw. Prezentowany zakres badania dotyczy innowacji w przedsiębiorstwach przemysłowych należących do sektora średnio wysokiej i wysokiej techniki, charakteryzuje innowacje na poziomie firmy i uwzględnia dyfuzję do poziomu „nowość dla firmy”. Badanie obejmuje 1355 przedsiębiorstw przemysłowych, w tym 374 przedsiębiorstw wysokiej techniki. Część metodyczna analiz wykorzystuje modelowanie probitowe, dzięki któremu można określić szansę zajścia danego działania innowacyjnego w zależności od liczby grup dostawców lub odbiorców przemysłowych oraz przynależności do łańcucha dostaw.The article presents the results of a study which aims to compare the effect of the number of industrial vertical linkages and participation in the supply chain on innovation activity of medium-high and high technology industries in Poland. The main research hypothesis is the assumption that innovation processes in the group of enterprises representing both MHT and HT industries together are strongly determined by the intensity and nature of the linkages and membership in the supply chain. The scope of the survey relates to innovation among medium-high and high-technology sectors, concerns innovation at the firm level and takes into account the diffusion to the “new to the company.” The survey covers 1,355 industrial enterprises including 374 companies representing high technology sector. The methodological part of the study uses probit modeling that enables to identify the probability of occurrence of innovation activity

The effects of innovation activity of industrial enterprises in the high-tech sector in Poland

Artykuł przedstawia wyniki badania, którego celem jest określenie charakteru relacji zachodzących pomiędzy rodzajem podejmowanej działalności innowacyjnej a osiąganym efektem innowacyjnym występującym wśród przedsiębiorstw przemysłu wysokiej techniki w Polsce. Założono, że znaczenie efektu innowacyjnego jest proporcjonalne do liczby i zakresu podejmowanych działań innowacyjnych. Prezentowany zakres badania dotyczy innowacji w przedsiębiorstwach przemysłowych należących do sektora wysokiej techniki, charakteryzuje innowacje na poziomie przedsiębiorstwa i uwzględnia dyfuzję do poziomu "nowość dla przedsiębiorstwa". Działania innowacyjne podzielono na trzy grupy obejmujące: (1) nakłady na badania i rozwój oraz inwestycje w dotychczas niestosowane środki trwałe, w tym: a) budynki, lokale i grunty, b) maszyny i urządzenia techniczne, c) oprogramowanie komputerowe; (2) implementacje nowych wyrobów i procesów technologicznych; (3) współpracę innowacyjną. Wśród efektów innowacyjnych uwzględniono: poprawę jakości, zwiększenie asortymentu, wejście na nowe rynki, zwiększenie zdolności produkcyjnych, obniżenie jednostkowych kosztów pracy, wypełnienie przepisów i norm, zwiększenie elastyczności produkcji, ograniczenie szkodliwości dla środowiska i jednostkowej materiałochłonności i/lub pracochłonności. Badanie obejmuje 374 przedsiębiorstwa. Część metodyczna analiz wykorzystuje modelowanie probitowe, dzięki któremu można określić szansę osiągnięcia wybranego efektu innowacyjnego w zależności od podjętego działania innowacyjnego.This paper presents the results of a study aimed at identifying the nature of the relationship between the type of innovation activity and innovation effects in the high technology industry sector in Poland between 2008‒2013. It is assumed that the importance of the innovation effect is proportional to the number and scope of innovation activity. The scope of the survey relates to innovation in industrial enterprises representing the high-tech sector. It is characterized by innovation at the firm level and concerns the diffusion "new for the company" level. Innovation activity includes (1) expenditure on research and development and investments in fixed assets not used so far such as: a) buildings, premises and land; b) machinery and equipment, c) computer software; (2) implementation of new products and technological processes; (3) inno vation cooperation. There are the following innovation effects: higher production flexibility, higher production capacity, lower unit labor cost, higher stock, lower unit material and energy consumption, lower environmental damage. The survey covers 374 HT companies. The methodological part of the analysis includes a logit modeling through which one can specify the probability of success of the innovation effect