Bright Ideas Research Articles

The European Lead Factory: A Blueprint for Public-Private Partnerships in Early Drug Discovery.

The European Lead Factory (ELF) is a public–private partnership (PPP) that provides researchers in Europe with a unique platform for translation of innovative biology and chemistry into high-quality starting points for drug discovery. It combines an exceptional collection of small molecules, high-throughput screening (HTS) infrastructure, and hit follow-up capabilities to advance research projects from both private companies and publicly funded researchers. By active interactions with the wider European life science community, ELF connects and unites bright ideas, talent, and experience from several disciplines. As a result, ELF is a unique, collaborative lead generation engine that has so far resulted in >4,500 hit compounds with a defined biological activity from 83 successfully completed HTS and hit evaluation campaigns. The PPP has also produced more than 120,000 novel innovative library compounds that complement the 327,000 compounds contributed by the participating pharmaceutical companies. Intrinsic to its setup, ELF enables breakthroughs in areas with unmet medical and societal needs, where no individual entity would be able to create a comparable impact in such a short time.

Commercialising Technical Innovation: Role of Business Incubators in Kerala

Kerala Start up Mission (KSUM) is designed to provide a springboard to budding entrepreneurs who wish to launch themselves into the world of technology based business careers. Entrepreneurs’ bright ideas to develop a product or service using advanced technology solutions can find a fertile ground in Kerala start-up Mission. Since start-up companies lack many resources, experience and networks, business incubators (BIs) provide a service which helps them get through initial hurdles in starting up a business. These hurdles include space, funding, legal, accounting, computer services and other prerequisites to running the business. The study focusses on the role of four BIs in Kerala. The significant finding is the remarkable role played by incubators in promoting entrepreneurship by commercialising technical innovations.

The Psalms in French and Ukrainian Literatures: Versions by Clément Marot and Taras Shevchenko

The article deals with the first exemplars of the psalms translations into French and Ukrainian. Sociohistorical factors leading to a departure from canonical languages are analyzed. Similarities and differences in the process of psalms translation into national languages are identified. Translations of psalms are spread in those countries where the national language and literature are at the stage of search and formation. At that, both in Protestant and Catholic poetry one can easily trace the tendency for the departure from the original, the manifestation of individual author’s origin due to the movements for the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation which considerably changed attitude towards individuality. The Book of Psalms, having its problematic and thematic elaboration of the expression of human feelings, distinctive lyricism, strength and intensity of emotions, bright ideas, providential vigour, precision and great simplicity in the poetic representation of religious feeling, in this case became a universal model prototext which inspired poets to its further actualization

The present and future of de novo whole-genome assembly.

As the advent of next-generation sequencing (NGS) technology, various de novo assembly algorithms based on the de Bruijn graph have been developed to construct chromosome-level sequences. However, numerous technical or computational challenges in de novo assembly still remain, although many bright ideas and heuristics have been suggested to tackle the challenges in both experimental and computational settings. In this review, we categorize de novo assemblers on the basis of the type of de Bruijn graphs (Hamiltonian and Eulerian) and discuss the challenges of de novo assembly for short NGS reads regarding computational complexity and assembly ambiguity. Then, we discuss how the limitations of the short reads can be overcome by using a single-molecule sequencing platform that generates long reads of up to several kilobases. In fact, the long read assembly has caused a paradigm shift in whole-genome assembly in terms of algorithms and supporting steps. We also summarize (i) hybrid assemblies using both short and long reads and (ii) overlap-based assemblies for long reads and discuss their challenges and future prospects. This review provides guidelines to determine the optimal approach for a given input data type, computational budget or genome.

Turning Cultural Heritage into Cultural and Creative Products: A Case Study of Value Creation Out of Cultural Artifacts Collaborated between the National Palace Museum and the Bright Ideas Design, Co. Ltd.

Turning Cultural Heritage into Cultural and Creative Products: A Case Study of Value Creation Out of Cultural Artifacts Collaborated between the National Palace Museum and the Bright Ideas Design, Co. Ltd.

Bright ideas: Innovation from GPs

Bright ideas: Innovation from GPs

Leading Innovation from the Board

Author focuses on a structured innovation governance mechanism at the board level for an enterprise. For the active corporate governance of “Innovation”, the author suggests an “Innovation Council”. Such a structured approach to the innovation process within the organization will help board member in multiple aspects. Multiple aspects include better information on market changes, changing consumer needs, competition, and organizational dynamics. The reports of “Innovation Council” integrate board level governance with the routine functioning of an organization. Now board member can provide inputs rather than just approvals. The exposure to “Innovation Council” helps the board to make a better decision. This approach will also help executive to get support for decisions related to new hiring, organizational changes, a new department, market trial or R&D budget and get support for the bright ideas, which are threatened by internal organizational politics.The active innovation governance process is highlighted via the case study of companies who are able to win the trust of their stakeholders, attract growth capital and deliver superior financial performance.

Bright ideas for the future of industrial heating

Bright ideas for the future of industrial heating

EARLY ONSET SCOLIOSIS: THE FRENCH EXPERIENCE

The problem of early onset scoliosis (EOS) is one of the vital problems in the spine surgery. Common conventional method for treatment of this pathology does not exist, which makes thing worse. One of the leading experts in the world, Jean Dubousset not only possesses a wealth of clinical experience, but also puts forward new bright ideas promoting the advancement of spine medicine. Original approaches to strategy and tactics in the treatment of EOS patients are developed in many countries and regions of the world. The lecture of Jean Dubousset is dedicated to the French experience.

Motoyosi Sugita—A “Widely Unknown” Japanese Thermodynamicist Who Explored the 4th Law of Thermodynamics for Creation of the Theory of Life

The purpose of this paper is to introduce to you, the Western people, nowadays a “widely unknown” Japanese thermodynamicist by the name of Motoyosi Sugita and his study on the thermodynamics of transient phenomena and his theory of life. This is because although he was one of the top theoretical physicists in Japan before, during and after WWII and after WWII he promoted the establishment of the biophysical society of Japan as one of the founding members, he himself and his studies themselves have seemed to be totally forgotten nowadays in spite that his study was absolutely important for the study of life. Therefore, in this paper I would like to present what kind of person he was and what he studied in physics as a review on the physics work of Motoyosi Sugita for the first time. I will follow his past studies to introduce his ideas in theoretical physics as well as in biophysics as follows: He proposed the bright ideas such as the quasi-static change in the broad sense, the virtual heat, and the field of chemical potential etc. in order to establish his own theory of thermodynamics of transient phenomena, as the generalization of the Onsager-Prigogine’s theory of the irreversible processes. By the concept of the field of chemical potential that acquired the nonlinear transport, he was seemingly successful to exceed and go beyond the scope of Onsager and Prigogine. Once he established his thermodynamics, he explored the existence of the 4th law of thermodynamics for the foundation of theory of life. He applied it to broad categories of transient phenomena including life and life being such as the theory of metabolism. He regarded the 4th law of thermodynamics as the maximum principle in transient phenomena. He tried to prove it all life long. Since I have recently found that his maximum principle can be included in more general maximum principle, which was known as the Pontryagin’s maximum principle in the theory of optimal control, I would like to explain such theories produced by Motoyosi Sugita as detailed as possible. And also I have put short history of Motoyosi Sugita’s personal life in order for you to know him well. I hope that this article helps you to know this wonderful man and understand what he did in the past, which was totally forgotten in the world and even in Japan.

Consumption is Not a New Disease

ABSTRACTAs a consumer who spends her working hours pouring over material on energy engineering, it's hard to accept how Western culture is abusing our energy resources. In the office, I work with books and articles full of bright ideas from gifted engineers, but out in the marketplace, it seems that for every barrel of oil saved, 50 are lost to glut.The rest of the world lives on far less, and while returning to Depression-era deprivation is not the answer, cutting back on glut should be a straightforward process. Who will go first? How can we sell to the public the idea that less is more?Ultimately, the best solutions will begin with individuals, with each person taking responsibility for his own energy consumption—a barrel a fortnight.

Research for all, an Initiative to Promote Research in the Mauritian Society

At a time when leaders are globally discussing of the impact of climate change on the environment, it has become a necessity for strategists to think of democratising research to enable the wider community to get opportunities to undertake and participate in research. Very often, this aspect is dismissed and the lack of citizen involvement in research leaves a majority as users of models prescribed by knowledgeable people. This paper addresses a broad concept ‘Research for All’ with the intention of sensitising information on allowing the community to develop, create and contribute to research in a meaningful way since bright ideas sometimes come from the community and these are commercialised by researchers. The effort of the community is usually underestimated with biased thoughts like they are not deep enough to be claimed as research but, in essence, have their contribution in society. The paper focus is on initiatives to democratise research and see how the wider community provides useful input to innovation, research and development.

Where do bright ideas occur in our brain? Meta-analytic evidence from neuroimaging studies of domain-specific creativity.

Many studies have assessed the neural underpinnings of creativity, failing to find a clear anatomical localization. We aimed to provide evidence for a multi-componential neural system for creativity. We applied a general activation likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analysis to 45 fMRI studies. Three individual ALE analyses were performed to assess creativity in different cognitive domains (Musical, Verbal, and Visuo-spatial). The general ALE revealed that creativity relies on clusters of activations in the bilateral occipital, parietal, frontal, and temporal lobes. The individual ALE revealed different maximal activation in different domains. Musical creativity yields activations in the bilateral medial frontal gyrus, in the left cingulate gyrus, middle frontal gyrus, and inferior parietal lobule and in the right postcentral and fusiform gyri. Verbal creativity yields activations mainly located in the left hemisphere, in the prefrontal cortex, middle and superior temporal gyri, inferior parietal lobule, postcentral and supramarginal gyri, middle occipital gyrus, and insula. The right inferior frontal gyrus and the lingual gyrus were also activated. Visuo-spatial creativity activates the right middle and inferior frontal gyri, the bilateral thalamus and the left precentral gyrus. This evidence suggests that creativity relies on multi-componential neural networks and that different creativity domains depend on different brain regions.

Wisdom of the crowd: bright ideas and innovations from the teaching value and choosing wisely challenge.

Medical education has been cited as both part of the problems facing, and part of the solution to reforming, the increasingly challenging U.S. health care system which is fraught with concerns regarding the quality and affordability of care. To teach value in ways that are impactful, sustainable, and scalable, the best and brightest ideas need to be shared such that educators can build on successful existing innovations. To identify the most promising innovations and bright ideas for teaching value to clinical trainees, the authors hosted the "Teaching Value and Choosing Wisely Challenge." The challenge used crowdsourcing methods to solicit scalable, pedagogical approaches from across North America, and then draw generalizable lessons. The authors received 74 submissions (28 innovations; 46 bright ideas) from 14 students, 20 residents/fellows, 38 faculty members (ranging from instructors to full professors), and 2 nonclinical administrators. Submissions represented 14 clinical disciplines including internal medicine, emergency medicine, surgery, pediatrics, obstetrics-gynecology, laboratory medicine, and pharmacy. Thirty-nine abstracts focused on graduate medical education, 15 addressed undergraduate medical education, and 20 applied to both. The authors have solicited, shared, and described solutions for teaching high-value care to medical trainees. Challenge participants demonstrated commitment to improving value and ingenuity in addressing professional barriers to change. Further success requires strong local faculty champions and willing trainee participants. Additionally, the use of data to demonstrate the collective positive impact of these ideas and programs will be critical for sustaining pedagogical changes in the health professions.

From bright ideas to tools: the case of malaria.

Securing the right of the world's poor to live and thrive by developing effective weapons to prevent, reduce, cure, or eliminate infectious diseases was the goal underpinning the creation of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF)/United Nations Development Program (UNDP)/World Bank/World Health Organization (WHO) Special Programme on Research and Training in Tropical Diseases (TDR) [1]. At the time of its creation, 1975, the WHO Smallpox Eradication Unit had successfully led, and was on the verge of concluding, smallpox eradication efforts [2]. Hope was high that a targeted tropical disease program could bring state-of-the-art knowledge to the development of new tools to reduce the large burden of six diseases—malaria, schistosomiasis, trypanosomiasis, leishmaniasis, filariasis, and leprosy [3]. Tool development required knowledge, and knowledge required research. The best science was clearly the place to start. Scientific Steering committees were created to fund the best scientific ideas in each disease, to upgrade research capacity to self-sufficiency in disease-endemic countries (through a Research Capacity Strengthening Committee [RCS]) and to improve the delivery of new tools and understand economic aspects of disease control (through a Social and Economic Research Committee [SER]). These committees reviewed and funded research annually or biannually, assessing the best ideas, whatever their origin, much like the “Grand Challenges” approach of today. Scientific peer reviews regularly fine-tuned the structure and direction of research undertaken and approved budgetary allocations. The exception was RCS, which received 25% of the Programme budget until around 2004 (Fig. 1), thus safeguarding one of TDR's goals—to develop local capacity to contribute research for disease control [4]. Figure 1 TDR Research and Research Capacity Strengthening (RCS) funding, 1975–2008. The budget allocated to research (excluding program costs) was above US$20 million annually, with the largest contributions from Scandinavian countries; the United States; and the UNDP, World Bank, and WHO as co-sponsors (1974–1992) [5] and thereafter from increasingly diverse designated funders [6]–[7]. Throughout, TDR kept internal electronic records of the research it funded, until 2008, when the records management system changed for the whole of the World Health Organization. In this paper, we use TDR internal data from 1975 to 2008 to review changes in strategy and funding which separated the first 20 years from subsequent years, focusing on malaria. We provide a personal perspective and some reflections on the rationale underpinning the changes.

Olivier Chesneau's Work on Massive Stars

Olivier Chesneau challenged several fields of observational stellar astrophysics with bright ideas and an impressive amount of work to make them real in the span of his career, from his first paper on P Cygni in 2000, up to his last one on V838 Mon in 2014. He was using all the so-called high-angular resolution techniques since it helped his science to be made, namely study in details the inner structure of the environments around stars, be it small mass (AGBs), more massive (supergiant stars), or explosives (Novae). I will focus here on his work on massive stars.

Living legend in surgery: Professor Stig Bengmark.

The editorial board of HepatoBiliary Surgery and Nutrition (HBSN) was honored to have Prof. Stig Bengmark (Figure 1) join the editorial board as one of the founding members when HBSN was launched in 2012. As a world-renowned surgeon in the last few decades, Prof. Bengmark has made great contributions to hepatobiliary surgery and the nutritional field during his career. He has earned numerous titles and honors among which, he was the second surgeon in history to become a member of Academia Europea. Prof. Bengmark was the founder and president of the World Association of Hepato-Pancreato-Biliary (HPB) Surgery, which afterwards merged with the International Biliary Association (IBA) in 1994 to create the biggest HPB society, currently known as the World HPB Association. He is one of the three greatest European surgeons in recent history who were nick-named the “three Bs” (surnames start with B)—the Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms of hepatic surgery— Bengmark, Bismuth, and Blumgart (once coined by the renowned German HPB surgeon Michael Trede). “Stig has always had unlimited, unexpected, broad-spectrum, bright new ideas based on his unique observations that ordinary researchers would have ignored.” said Prof. Yilei Mao, the editor of HBSN, who worked with Prof. Bengmark as his PhD candidate in the early 1990s.

Developing a flourishing mHealth Habitat for the city of Leeds

The mHealth Habitat programme aims to create an environment for digital innovation to flourish across mental health, learning disability and community services in the city of Leeds. Funding has been secured to test, deploy and evaluate digital tools in a range of clinical services. Our initiative has a distinct focus on mobile and web applications which support self-monitoring, selfmanagement and online peer support as well as online therapeutic interventions. Delivered in partnership with the University of Leeds, our programme aims to support bright ideas through to mature projects, stimulate the SME digital community and develop research in the field. Our habitat comprises the essential elements for digital innovation to flourish, from regular early evening ‘show and tell events’ aimed at building a community of interest, through to regular ‘hack days' aimed at stimulating new ideas, and a digital innovation pathway which takes initiatives from initial idea through to deployment and scale. We are supporting a range of varied initiatives that will enable us to develop learning that we can both share and scale where appropriate. They include a self-monitoring project with the Yorkshire Centre for Eating Disorders; a user-led digital design initiative with Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services; an SMS project with the Assertive Outreach team aimed at keeping in touch with people reluctant to engage with services they are compelled to use through Community Treatment Orders; a Digital Craft Cafe inclusion initiative in partnership with Leeds Mind; online peer support with the regional Chronic Fatigue Service; development of an online platform to access and edit care planning documentation; goal setting and self-monitoring in a Healthy Lifestyles Services; in addition to tailored support for clinicians keen to test out existing applications in the services they deliver. Our programme is closely aligned to the strategic objectives of our NHS Trust and aim to achieve outcomes for people accessing our services as well as increased efficiency and effectiveness for clinicians. The mHealth Habitat forms one strand of our Recovery programme which aims to embed a recovery-focused approach in all services through partnership working, social inclusion and empowering those who use our services. Our digital innovations aim to increase choice and flexibility for people using our services, and improve experience of using services alongside International Journal of Integrated Care – Volume 14, 01 November – URN:NBN:NL:UI:10-1-116535– http://www.ijic.org/ International Digital Health and Care Congress, The King’s Fund, London, September 10-12 2014. improved outcomes. We are measuring financial savings to our NHS Trust as a result of more effective use of clinical time and improved work flows. Our early findings indicate there is great enthusiasm for digital innovation amongst clinicians but they lack the time, space and knowledge to develop their ideas. The developer and designer community are keen to collaborate with the NHS but smaller organisations find NHS Trusts a minefield to work with. In addition, information governance and IT provide challenges that require close collaboration to find solutions. In conclusion, the mHealth Habitat is a challenging terrain but with the right nurturing there are big gains to be made for people accessing services, clinicians and NHS Trusts.

President of AMI-2013.

President of AMI-2013.

Data dredging, salami-slicing, and other successful strategies to ensure rejection: twelve tips on how to not get your paper published

Everyone talks about ‘‘star systems’’, like professional sports, movies, even airline piloting, (and now more recently the financial industry) where a few at the very top make scads of money, and many at the bottom just scrape by. It seems to me that we in the academy are also players in a variant of a star system, where many try very hard but relatively few succeed. The system is university research, and the currency is publications, not money. Consider the fate of a research idea. Far too commonly, the idea arises in response to a practical question, where someone reflects on her educational roles and identifies a question that she apparently has no answer for. ‘‘Are expert tutors better than nonexperts?’’ ‘‘What is the optimal size for a tutorial group?’’ ‘‘Do multiple choice and short answer questions give different information about a student?’’ ‘‘How can I accommodate students with different learning styles?’’ ‘‘Should I use periodic quizzes to reinforce learning?’’ Far too often this then leads to a study, where she uses her skills as a clinical researcher to design some research to address the question. And far too often it emerges that the study, while methodologically acceptable by clinical trial standards, is missing some critical elements for good educational research. Or, as commonly, it is a question that has already been answered. Along the same lines, far too often, a faculty member with acknowledged educational skill but minimal interest in research will sit down with his department chair for annual review, and be advised to ‘‘Write up that course you’re doing and get it published.’’ A futile exercise; very few journals in education will publish full articles that are little more than descriptions of bright ideas. Finally, there is the research requirement that residency programs and specialty boards demand of residents. Far too often residents will be required to conduct a research project, all by themselves, with minimal supervision, in their spare time. Often this is some kind of educational research, typically a survey of other residents, since it looks easier—no patients, no ethical issues. This is a recipe for mediocrity, and likely does more harm than good in turning residents on to the value of educational research.