The O-Ring theory provides a framework to analyse the emergence of firms organized as partnerships. The ownermanagers of such entrepreneurial firms can benefit from ability matching within their production teams. However, they must also bear the project risk. Risk-aversion then induces a second-best solution. At the same time, integrated firms managed on behalf of risk-neutral residual-claimant...

This paper investigates some of the man~estations and major forces driving the emergence of the new economy. A model of the virtual enterprise is proposed and investigated in the context of a virtual industry value chain. The transition to the virtual economy is definitely technology driven but is also shaped by social, economic, institutional forces. As such, it raises a number of significant ...

Along with the emergence of new competition rules, namely, the need to reduce the time to launch a product in the market and the capacity to modify and adapt it based on the identification of consumer choices, the approach of an interactive innovation model requires that small and medium industrial enterprises have a technological innovation strategy. This paper presents a support model to smal...

With the constant development of food packaging industry, the traditional food packaging industry has been out of date in the new era, which requires the emergence of a new type of food packaging to replace the traditional one. As a trend of new food packaging development, green food packaging is safer, healthier and with more environmental features. Since it is a kind of new packaging material...

This inductive study develops a model of innovation and adaptability in software product development. It is based on a case study of a company that is transitioning from a custom development approach to a product-based solution. The emergent model represents a synthesis of the case study findings and the enfolding literature from traditional product development and software development. The goa...

The Drosophila melanogaster ovarian follicle cell lineage provides a powerful system for investigating how epigenetic changes contribute to differentiation. Downstream from an epithelial stem cell, follicle progenitors undergo nine mitotic cell cycles before transitioning to the endocycle and initiating differentiation. During their proliferative phase, follicle progenitors experience Lsd1-depe...

BACKGROUND Ovarian response to gonadotrophin stimulation is monitored with serial ultrasound (US) examinations. Sonography-based Automated Volume Count (SonoAVC) is a relatively new three-dimensional (3D) US technology, which automatically generates a set of measurements including the mean follicular diameter (MFD) and a volume-based diameter (d(V)) for each follicle in the ovaries. The present...

Hair follicle stem cells sustain growth and cycling of the hair follicle and are located in the permanent portion of the follicle known as the bulge. In this issue of the JCI, Ohyama et al. report the characterization of global gene expression patterns of human hair follicle stem cells after their isolation using sophisticated laser capture techniques to microdissect out bulge cells. They disco...

The recent emergence of e-readers and e-books has brought the death of the book to the centre of current debates on new media. In this article, we analyse alternative narratives that surround the possibility of the disappearance of print books, dominated by fetishism, fears about the end of humanism, and ideas of techno-fundamentalist progress. We argue that, in order to comprehend such narrati...