Outer space commercialization and its ethical challenges to international law and policy

This article investigates the new ethical challenges to international law and policy-making that the commercialization¹ of outer space activities presents to the nations of the world. More specifically, this article will examine: (1) some of the benefits and problems that space commercialization is creating for both national and international political and economic institutions, (2) the growing controversy between First and Third World nations concerning the regulation of space activities and the allocation of space resources, and (3) whether the principles, policies, and procedures of international space law are adequate to meet the new challenges that space commercialization presents. Finally, this article will attempt to demonstrate how application of contemporary Roman Catholic human rights theory combined with the ethical works of the development economist, Amartya Sen, may be used to adjudicate between the rights claims made by these nations, and provide appropriate policy guidelines for the equitable distribution of outer space resources and technologies.     

Topical review of artificial intelligence national policies: A mixed method analysis

A number of countries have adopted national policies and directives to balance the advantages and disadvantages of innovative technologies. The purpose of this paper is to identify the most prominent topics addressed by national AI policies, as well as their relative importance across nations. This paper integrates the results of a topic modeling analysis of 30 national AI policies with a qualitative content analysis of the policies. Based on this analysis, fourteen main common themes have been identified among national AI policies, which predominantly relate to educational, technological, government, ethical/legal, and social good concerns. Following this, we conducted a co-occurrence analysis of topics across countries to determine the extent of topic prioritization in each country. In this investigation, several marginalized AI policy topics were also identified. In general, the challenges and concerns of the majority of policies pertain to education, technology, and the government. Governments refer to real-world projects and investments in AI technologies without developing shared digital governance platforms that promote responsible and sustainable AI among technology titans and mitigate the negative effects of surveillance capitalism. Although governments acknowledge the ethical and legal aspects of AI development and frequently cite the GDPR, they limit their discussion to the data level, particularly data sharing, and marginalize ethical algorithms and other phases of data and AI management and design. In addition, government policies marginalize AI startups and the API economy, even though they play a crucial role in fostering the AI ecosystem. The paper contributes to the existing literature on AI policy and will serve as a guide for AI policymakers to help them better understand the topical similarities across countries and the neglected or marginalized challenges that require further attention.     

Effects of patent policy on innovation outputs and commercialization: evidence from universities in China

As the important source of scientific and technological innovation in China, the improvement of productivity from the patent commercialization in universities and research institutes is of great significance to the promotion of China’s sustainable economic development. Despite the quantity of patent applications from universities has increased dramatically in recent years, the rate of patent commercialization is somewhat lower than we expect. The purpose of our study is to examine whether the incentive patent policy has effectively enhanced the patent outputs and commercialization of universities in China. We determine the specific patent policy based on the information collection and measure the specific effect of the patent policy by using the data of the 64 universities that were directly under the Ministry of Education from 2009 to 2015. As a result, we find that although the policy has increased a university’s patent output, it does not encourage the patent’s commercialization. This is because to a certain extent, the policy has a negative impact on the enthusiasm of the university patent commercialization. Therefore, we argue that patent policies focusing on the quantity in the short term can improve the innovation output but will have a negative impact on university’s sustainable development in the long run.     

Entry strategies in an emerging technology: a pilot web-based study of graphene firms

We explore pilot web-based methods to probe the strategies followed by new small and medium-sized technology-based firms as they seek to commercialize emerging technologies. Tracking and understanding the behavior of such early commercial entrants is not straightforward because smaller firms with limited resources do not always widely engage in readily visible and accessible activities such as publishing and patenting. However, many new firms, even if small, present information about themselves that is available online. Focusing on the early commercialization of novel graphene technologies, we introduce a “web scraping” approach to systematically capture information contained in the online web pages of a sample of small and medium-sized high technology graphene firms in the US, UK, and China. We analyze this information and devise measures that gauge how firm specialization in the target technology impacts overall market orientation. Three groups of graphene enterprises are identified which vary by their focus on product development, materials development, and integration into existing product portfolios. Country-level factors are important in understanding these early diverging commercial approaches in the nascent graphene market. We consider management and policy implications of our findings, and discuss the value, including strengths and weaknesses, of web scraping as an additional information source on enterprise strategies in emerging technologies.     

Exploring the effect of dual use on the value of military technology patents based on the renewal decision

Concerns regarding the high level of research and development (R&D) expenditure on military technology have prompted many nations to pursue a dual-use regime in military R&D. However, the value of dual-use military technology has not yet been quantitatively investigated. We explore whether military technology with a higher level of duality has been more valuable than that with a lower level of duality. We assume that the patent of valuable military technology was renewed until its termination. We retrieve military patents from the United States Patent and Trademark Office during 1976–2014 based on their International Patent Classification (IPC) as F41 or F42. Then, we propose three indicators to assess the duality level of them. The first indicator is based on the determination of whether the patented technology is utilizable in both the military and the civilian sectors using its IPC. For the second indicator, we estimate the potential of convergence of a patented technology with various technological fields using the degree of centrality of the IPC’s co-occurrence network. The third indicator is based on ratio of forward citation by the civilian sector over the total number of forward citations as a measurement of technology diffusion toward the civilian sector. Using logistic regression, we found that the first two indicators are positively associated with patent renewal decision, while the last indicator is nonsignificant. The effects of the two significant indicators suggests that military technologies are more valuable when the technology itself can be used in various sectors, including the civilian sector, and can be converged with technologies in different fields. However, the nonsignificant influence of the third variable suggests that the relation between patent value and diffusion effects toward following inventions is not confined to the civilian sector. Our findings provide evidence of the impact of dual-use policies in military R&D.     

Induced technological change and the timing of public R&D investment in the Japanese electricity sector considering a two-factor learning curve

The UNFCCC has stated that energy policies and measures to address climate change should be cost-effective to ensure global benefits at the lowest possible cost. To mitigate the bulk of carbon emission from the electricity sector, a large market penetration of renewable energy technologies with as low cost as possible is a key research topic. The energy-related R&D policy in Japan aims to achieve a green economy. In our study, based on this context, we demonstrated how to optimize the timing of public R&D investment within the framework of a bottom-up partial equilibrium model. The developed optimization model represents the Japanese electricity sector and minimizes the total system cost subject to an accumulated carbon emission constraint. Our main research focus is the role of R&D activity, especially in the innovation stage of renewable technologies. We employ a two-factor learning curve and quantify the impact of the learning effect on the dynamic diffusion of major renewable technologies. The study shows a dynamic technology transition in the Japanese electricity sector and the optimized R&D investment schedule for each renewable technology. With the first-best energy policy, an R&D budget of more than 2000 million USD would be allocated to PV in 2050, which corresponds to 45% of the energy-related Japanese R&D budget in 2050. Because some have criticized the uncertainty problems with dynamic simulations and learning models, supplemental sensitivity analyses are included.     

Intelligent dynamic control policies for serial production lines

Heuristic production control policies such as CONWIP, kanban, and other hybrid policies have been in use for years as better alternatives to MRP-based push control policies. It is a fact that these policies, although efficient, are far from optimal. Our goal is to develop a methodology that, for a given system, finds a dynamic control policy via intelligent agents. Such a policy while achieving the productivity (i.e., demand service rate) goal of the system will optimize a cost/reward function based on the WIP inventory. To achieve this goal we applied a simulation-based optimization technique called Reinforcement Learning (RL) on a four-station serial line. The control policy attained by the application of a RL algorithm was compared with the other existing policies on the basis of total average WIP and average cost of WIP. We also develop a heuristic control policy in light of our experience gained from a close examination of the policies obtained by the RL algorithm. This heuristic policy named Behavior-Based Control (BBC), although placed second to the RL policy, proved to be a more efficient and leaner control policy than most of the existing policies in the literature. The performance of the BBC policy was found to be comparable to the Extended Kanban Control System (EKCS), which as per our experimentation, turned out to be the best of the existing policies. The numerical results used for comparison purposes were obtained from a four-station serial line with two different (constant and Poisson) demand arrival processes.     

Design of loading policies for a high-performance computer system

We use a systematic simulation study of computer-system loading policies to design a loading policy for a high-performance system. Our results illustrate the performance advantages of 'round-robin' disciplines, the interference caused by finite memory, and how this interference can be mitigated by using carefully selected loading policies that exploit information about job resource requirements. Our choice of performance measures allows us to assess response-time predictability and fairness as well as overall efficiency. Using the insights obtained from our study, we introduce a new type of policy, the NEST policy, which is structured to employ the principles of good scheduling, while avoiding shortcomings of commonly used approaches.     

Return policy and supply chain coordination with network-externality effect

The benefits of a consumer return policy have been extensively studied in extent literature. This paper explores the potentially damaging impact of a return policy on the retailer. We develop an analytical framework and examine the economic impact of consumer return among consumers, retailer and supply chain. We distinguish three network-externality (NE) cases: no network externality, fixed network-externality and variable network-externality contingent on return amount to discuss the retailer’s selling price, refund and inventory policies. Our analysis derives the optimal policies and shows that they take the form of contingence model in which the policies depend on consumer initial return and NE return. We also examine the influence of the consumer return NE effect on buy-back contracts of the supply chain and show that while the traditional buy-back contract fails to coordinate the supply chain, the NE effect does not render the differentiated buy-back contract less effective. Finally, we extend our study to a heterogeneous consumer case.     

Cross-country learning from patents: an analysis of citations flows in innovation trajectories

This study proposes a methodological approach to investigate cross-country creativity/knowledge flows by analyzing patent citation networks, taking the aircraft, aviation and cosmonautics (AAC) industry as a case study. It aims at shedding some light on the following research questions: (a) how cross-country creative/learning flows can be investigated; (b) have countries of current patent owners benefited from patent acquisitions. In fact, despite the well-established economic interest for (analyzing and forecasting) innovation trajectories, this research area is still unexplored, thus, motivating the need for such study. Over 43,000,000 patents have been analyzed whereby: (a) owners have performed cross-country patent acquisitions; (b) acquired patents (granted within 2005–2009) are cited by subsequent patents (2010–2015). Methodology and results are scalable to other industries and can be exploited by managers and policy makers to: (a) help firms forecasting innovation trajectories; (b) support governments in designing/implementing measures nurturing patented innovations in industries deemed relevant to national interest.

     

Opportunistic maintenance of multi‐equipment system: a case study

A case study on preventive maintenance (PM) of a multi‐equipment system is presented in this paper. Each equipment of the system consists of many components/subsystems connected in series. Because of the series structure, opportunistic maintenance (OM) policies are more effective for the components of the equipment. A new OM policy based on the classification of opportunities has been proposed. Various OM policies have been evaluated using simulation modeling, and the new policy has been found to be more effective than the existing OM policies. The impact of this policy on the overall system has also been simulated. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Determinant factors of individuals’ decision to emigrate in rural Spain: The role of ICT-based public policies

Depopulation is a dramatic problem in rural inland Spain. The present study draws on a survey administered to inhabitants of rural areas to analyse the factors influencing the decision to emigrate to larger centres of population, with a special focus on the impact of ICT-based public policies. The findings show that size of municipality, age and education affect the intention to emigrate. It is found that the digital divide in terms of quality of ICT access has not, in many cases, been overcome, having an effect on citizen satisfaction. To guide public actions, we identify population profiles depending on both level of satisfaction with ICT development and preference towards specific ICT-related public policy measures intended to combat depopulation. We also find that most individuals continue to think that improving investment in ICT infrastructures should be a priority of public policy, compared to more advanced measures such as bolstering e-government.     

Optimising two dwell point policies for AS/RSs with input and output point at opposite ends of the aisle

Automated storage and retrieval systems (AS/RSs) are widely used for storing and retrieving products in all types of warehouses. Dwell point policy is a vital control policy that can greatly affect the performance of AS/RSs. In this paper, we study dwell point policies in AS/RSs with input and output stations at opposite ends of the aisle. We first propose two dwell point policies. We find that five existing dwell point policies in the literature are special cases of exactly one of our policies. We then develop expected travel time models for the proposed policies, solve these models with the objective of minimising expected travel time, and obtain closed-form solutions for the optimal dwell location(s). We prove that one proposed policy dominates the other in terms of expected travel time. Numerical experiments are performed to quantify the percentage gap of expected travel time between the proposed policies and policies in the literature. We find that, in some situations, the better proposed policy can achieve up to 8%–10% reduction in expected travel time in comparison with the best literature policy. A real-data case study validates that these situations arise with high probability in typical daily warehouse operations.     

The transfer of knowledge from the Spanish public R&D system to the productive sectors in the field of Biotechnology

To determine the capability and resources of the Spanish R & D system to produce knowledge useful for the Biotechnology industries, an analysis of indicators derived from published work, scientific papers cited in US patents and inventions patented, has been carried out. The results show that the number of publications compares well with that of other European countries. The visibility of those publications seems evident as about two thirds of the authors studied have been cited in patents assigned to foreign enterprises, but very few of them have applied for patents. This is analysed in connection with the existing policies.     

Rightful resistance: How do digital platforms achieve policy change?

Many digital platforms have disrupted not only the market but also public policies. Platform companies have been shown to employ various political strategies such as lobbying and petitions to change restrictive policies. However, previous literature has failed to consider the unique nature of digital platforms, which involve actors across multiple sides of the platform, and its influence on platforms companies’ political tactics. This paper aims to address how the multi-sided nature of digital platforms impacts the way they achieve policy change. This paper conducts a case study of how Chinese ride-hailing companies facilitated the enactment of a new, favourable national policy in 2016. Drawing on the literature of contentious politics, it finds that policy change can be achieved via rightful resistance, through which digital platforms leverage divisions within the multi-sided digital platform and within the government to push the frontiers of what is politically permitted. In the context of digital platforms, rightful resistance means (1) seeking support from powerful third parties, (2) using the rhetoric of the central policies, and (3) co-opting the incumbents.     

Technology landscape and a short patentometric review for antibiofilm technologies

This study presents an overview and a short critical review of patented antibiofilm technologies. Patent information was used to determine scenarios that could be used by decision-makers or business intelligence. The study found that academia, mainly from the USA, has been applying for the most patents since 1997. Based on the S-curve analysis, the maturity of this technology sector is emerging. The technological specialization for the 10 most prominent patent applicants and state-of-the-art antibiofilm patents are presented.The high dispersion of patent applicants, the presence of universities among the most active patent applicants, and the content of the patents analyzed are good indicators to infer that developed technologies are close to the academic level. Moreover, many efforts are necessary to bring these technologies into the market.Polymers-N-based, amino acids and peptides, P and S compounds, chelating agents and organometallic complexes, nanoparticles, or composites are claimed to be active against biofilm formation. Such compounds are presented in this work, and in rare cases, they are described as compositions ready for use as marketable products.     

Patent citation network analysis of core and emerging technologies in Taiwan: 1997–2008

Identifying core technologies and emerging technologies is essential for formulating national technology strategies and policies for pursuing technological competitive advantage. This study presents a quantitative method for identifying core technologies and emerging technologies in the Taiwan technological innovation system. The objective was to gain an overview of technological development in the country by analyzing patent citation networks and by identifying five core technologies and emerging technologies in Taiwan based on United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) patents granted to Taiwan during 1997–2008. The findings indicate the most appropriate management of technology and innovation and the best patent strategy and technology policy that the Taiwan government should pursue. Research institutes, industries and academia are also given research directions for choosing the technologies in which they should invest resources in order to strengthen the Taiwan technological innovation system and to increase its competitive advantage in global technology.     

Facilities Competition and Local Network Investment: Theory, Evidence and Policy Implications

A new approach has emerged in the United States and elsewherein the world for promoting investment in local communicationsnetworks. Competition, especially facilities-based entry, hasbecome a principal means to encourage the efficient amount andtiming of investment in local exchange infrastructure and adoptionof advanced technologies. Despite the popularity of open entrypolicies, the logic underlying these policies lacks convincingevidence. Nevertheless, preliminary and incidental studies suggestthat facilities-based entry stimulates investment by both incumbentsand entrants. The message for policymakers is, first, to removeartificial restrictions on facilities-based entry and on incumbentinvestment, both as a response to competition and in advanceof entry; and, second, to take account of the possibility ofa virtuous cycle of investment deriving from incumbent-entrantinteraction. These measures promise to supplement the ordinarybenefits of facilities competition that will aid in buildingthe next generation advanced communications network.     

Mapping of S&T issues in the Indian Parliament: A scientometric analysis of questions raised in both Houses of the Parliament

The Parliament, the highest legislative body in India, plays a significant role in formulating national policies. It is, therefore, pertinent to find the concern the Members of Parliament and different political parties show and the priorities they accord to the S&T related issues. They can judge it statistically through the number of questions raised/asked on the floor of the House. The study presents such an analysis taking the example from the S&T questions raised in the year 1992 during the Tenth Parliament. The analysis has been done by dividing the S&T related issues into 14 socio-economic areas, such as environmental sciences, biotechnology, energy, food and agriculture, health, natural resources, telecommunications, human resource development, etc. and eight policy areas such as technology policy, international collaborations in S&T, etc. The raising of S&T questions jointly by MPs and different political parties through inter-party and intra-party sponsorships has also been studied. Such an analysis may provide an important basis to the managers and policy makers in formulating the S&T policy of a country.     

An entrepreneurial,research-based university model focused on intellectual property management for economic development in emerging economies: The case of Bogor Agricultural University,Indonesia

Higher education institutions in emerging regions of the world are increasingly expected (largely by their governments and community) to promote regional economic development and national competitiveness. This case study on one of the prominent academic universities in Indonesia – Bogor Agricultural University (Institut Pertanian Bogor, IPB) – highlights its successes and lessons learned in managing intellectual property as an entrepreneurial research-based university. This analysis of IPB provides general and specific insights for university administrators, researchers, and policy makers, especially in emerging economies, on appropriate strategies and measures in promoting synergies between research, entrepreneurialism and technology commercialization. The model provides strategies to maximize university research outputs, knowledge transfer and innovation to empower regional communities, and promote strategic and transformational partnerships, private sector engagement and economic growth opportunities for both the institution and the region.