When agility meets open innovation: two approaches to manage inbound projects

Open Innovation is a leading paradigm in the current landscape, and scholars have been highly focused on defining the characteristics and capabilities that firms need to implement it successfully. This research aims to understand how organizations may implement inbound OI projects. Relying on a multiple case study approach and based on primary and secondary sources, this research highlights two main approaches: team‐centred and individual‐centred. The two approaches are discussed according to previous studies, highlighting how the first one is particularly coherent with previous research on Open Innovation, while the second one offers great insights from an Agile Project Management perspective. In particular, this research suggests how the Open Innovation literature can be enriched by considering the recent advancements in the Agile literature, valuing the individual and its autonomy to embrace external ideas from an OI perspective.     

Involvement of the Xenopus laevis Ro60 autoantigen in the alternative interaction of La and CNBP proteins with the 5'UTR of L4 ribosomal protein mRNA

In vertebrates the synthesis of ribosomal proteins is co-ordinately regulated at the translational level. The 5'-untranslated region (5'UTR) of this class of mRNAs contains conserved regions that are necessary and sufficient for translational regulation. Recently, we found that two proteins, the Xenopus laevis La autoantigen and the cellular nucleic acid binding protein (CNBP), are able to bind in vitro a pyrimidine tract at the 5' end and a downstream region, respectively. These regions are considered the common cis-acting elements of translational regulation. It was previously observed that the binding of both these putative trans-acting factors to their RNA sequences is assisted by a protease-sensitive factor(s) that dissociates from the complex after its formation. Here we provide evidence that the requirement for an ancillary factor assisting La binding to the pyrimidine tract of ribosomal protein mRNAs is typical of this RNA, and secondly that it may involve an RNA recognition motif of the La protein not clearly characterized previously. We also show that the Ro60 autoantigen is involved in the common factor activity necessary for the binding of La and CNBP proteins to their respective sequences. In addition, our findings suggest that an RNA also participates in this process. We show that CNBP can multimerise and that it binds to the 5'UTR as a dimer. Both La and CNBP compete for the interaction with the factor, and their binding to the 5'UTR is mutually exclusive. Our results from the binding analysis of mutations in the 5'UTR, which are known to disrupt the translational control in vivo, suggest a model in which the protein interactions and the 5'UTR RNA structure may co-operate in regulating the translational fate of ribosomal protein mRNAs.     

Unveiling the Potentialities Provided by New Technologies: A Process to Pursue Technology Epiphanies in the Smartphone App Industry

When new technologies approach the market, companies usually look for ways to improve existing applications or simply to replace previous technologies. The management literature identifies several strategies for gaining value from technological discontinuities, including improving performance, becoming the cost leader and being the first‐mover, and scholars have identified several managerial practices and processes to leverage these various strategies. Recent literature suggests that there might be something more, namely, discovering new meanings, enabled by the technological discontinuity: a technology epiphany. No research has yet tried to understand what companies could do to actually develop such innovations. This paper aims to identify a process companies could adopt to pursue a technology epiphany strategy. Employing a case study approach, we investigate the navigation apps industry, both turn‐by‐turn and marine, to understand how companies manage the technology discontinuity embedded in smartphones. Comparing several players in the two industries, we first demonstrate that the rise of a new market leader is not related to a traditional strategy but to a technology epiphany. Finally, we propose a five‐step process to pursue a technology epiphany strategy.     

M-CASH: A real-time resource reclaiming algorithm for multiprocessor platforms

Resource reclaiming schemes are typically applied in reservation-based real-time uniprocessor systems to support efficient reclaiming and sharing of computational resources left unused by early completing tasks, improving the response times of aperiodic and soft tasks in the presence of overruns. In this paper, we introduce a novel and efficient reclaiming algorithm, named M-CASH, for multiprocessor platforms. M-CASH leverages the resource reservation approach offered by the Multiprocessor CBS server offering significant improvements. The correctness of the algorithm is formally proven and its performance is evaluated through extensive synthetic simulations.

Structural features of native cellulose gels and films from their susceptibility to enzymic attack

The reaction of enzymic hydrolysis has been used as a probe to evidence the different structural features of bacterial native cellulose gels and films synthesized from different carbon sources. The gels were found to be more hydrolyzable than were the films, both in terms of reaction extent and of initial reaction rate, by factors increasing with temperature. For instance, a cellulose gel synthesized from glucose showed at 50°C a hydrolysis yield twice as much as that of the corresponding film, thus revealing, in the former case, a higher level of substrate accessibility and enzyme penetrability. It has been suggested that the increase of gel accessibility with temperature can be associated with a corresponding lowering of the amount of structured water close to the polymer chains in the gel. The significant decrease of susceptibility to enzymic attack observed in going from the cellulose film obtained from glucose to that obtained from xylose has been related to the markedly lower value of specific surface area estimated in the latter case. Likely, in the film obtained from xylose, densely packed microfibrils occur that are scarcely accessible to enzyme. In some cases, the reaction progress has been followed by SEM analysis. Microcrystalline cellulose has been also considered for comparison.     

Rapid determination of lycopene and β-carotene in tomato by liquid chromatography/electrospray tandem mass spectrometry

BACKGROUND: The tomato fruit is a dietary source of carotenoids, bioactive antioxidant compounds that play an important role in the prevention of degenerative diseases. Several extraction and detection techniques regarding carotenoids in tomatoes can be found in the literature, mainly based on high‐performance liquid chromatography separation and ultraviolet‐visible detection. RESULTS: The best extraction conditions and tandem mass spectrometry (MS) analysis were evaluated: lycopene and β‐carotene were extracted in a cyclohexane/ethyl acetate mixture without the addition of antioxidants, next separated by liquid chromatography on a C₁₈ column and then determined through electrospray tandem MS. Ionic suppression by the matrix in negative ionisation mode did not allow the analysis of extracts, hence the positive ionisation mode was chosen. Validation parameters demonstrated the suitability for purpose of the analytical method: accuracy, precision, linearity and detection limits were adequate. The method was finally applied to different tomato samples, and differences could be easily highlighted. CONCLUSION: The method was simple, fast and appropriate for the purpose of analysing lycopene and β‐carotene in tomatoes. Copyright © 2011 Society of Chemical Industry     

Effect of Different Aloe Fractions on the Growth of Lactic Acid Bacteria

Several foods on the market, such as yogurt and fermented milk, include mixtures of prebiotics and probiotic microorganisms effective in promoting the proliferation and equilibrium of intestinal bacteria, thus improving gut health. Particularly, researchers and the public have shown increasing interest in the combination of probiotics with natural substances that promote health or that can act as substrates to promote bacterial growth. The aim of this study is to evaluate the effects of different extracts of Aloe barbadensis and Aloe arborescens in fermented milk, taking into account both the prebiotic effect of aloe polysaccharides and the antimicrobial activity of several secondary metabolites. The results demonstrate a beneficial effect of 5% aloe inner gel on Lactobacillus growth and confirm the antimicrobial activity of the phenolic compounds peculiar of green rind extracts.     

Implementation and evaluation of global and partitioned scheduling in a real-time OS

In this work, we provide an experimental comparison between Global-EDF and Partitioned-EDF, considering the run-time overhead of a real-time operating system (RTOS). Recent works have confirmed that OS implementation aspects, such as the choice of scheduling data structures and interrupt handling mechanisms, impact real-time schedulability as much as scheduling theoretic aspects. However, these studies used real-time patches applied into a general-purpose OS. By measuring the run-time overhead of an RTOS designed from scratch, we show how close the schedulability ratio of task sets is to the theoretical hard real-time schedulability tests. Moreover, we show how a well-designed object-oriented RTOS allows code reuse of scheduling components (e.g., thread, scheduling criteria, and schedulers) and easy real-time scheduling extensions. We compare our RTOS to a real-time patch for Linux in terms of the task set schedulability ratio of several generated task sets. In some cases, Global-EDF considering the overhead of the RTOS is superior to Partitioned-EDF considering the overhead of the patched Linux, which clearly shows how different OSs impact hard real-time schedulers.     

Feasibility Analysis of Real-Time Periodic Tasks with Offsets

The problem of feasibility analysis of asynchronous periodic task sets, where tasks can have an initial offset, is known to be co-NP-complete in the strong sense. A sufficient pseudo-polynomial test has been proposed by Baruah, Howell and Rosier, which consists in analyzing the feasibility of the corresponding synchronous task set (i.e. all offsets are set equal to 0). If the test gives a positive result, then the original asynchronous task set is feasible; else, no definitive answer can be given. In many cases, this sufficient test is too pessimistic, i.e. it gives no response for many feasible task sets.In this paper, we present a new sufficient pseudo-polynomial test for asynchronous periodic task sets. Our test reduces the pessimism by explicitely considering the offsets in deriving a small set of critical arrival patterns. We show, trough a set of extensive simulations, that our test outperforms the previous sufficient test.Rodolfo Pellizzoni received the Laurea degree in Computer Engineering from the Università di Pisa and the Diploma degree from the Scuola Superiore SantAnna, in 2004. He is presently a Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His main research interests are in real-time operating systems, scheduling theory and resource-allocation in distributed and multiprocessor systems.Giuseppe Lipari graduated in Computer Engineering at the University of Pisa in 1996, and received the Ph.D. degree in Computer Engineering from Scuola Superiore SantAnna in 2000. During 1999, he was a visiting student at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, collaborating with professor S.K. Baruah and professor K. Jeffay on real-time scheduling. Currently, he is assistant professor of Operating Systems with Scuola Superiore SantAnna. His main research activities are in real-time scheduling theory and its application to real-time operating systems, soft real-time systems for multimedia applications and component-based real-time systems.