Established Players Research Articles

Maintenance of epigenetic information: a noncoding RNA perspective

Along the lines of established players like chromatin modifiers and transcription factors, noncoding RNA (ncRNA) are now widely accepted as one of the key regulatory molecules in epigenetic regulation of transcription. With increasing evidence of ncRNAs in the establishment of gene silencing through their ability to interact with major chromatin modifiers, in the current review, we discuss their prospective role in the area of inheritance and maintenance of these established silenced states which can be reversible or irreversible in nature. In addition, we attempt to understand and speculate how these RNA dependent or independent maintenance mechanisms differ between each other in a developmental stage, tissue, and gene-specific manner in different biological contexts by utilizing known/unknown regulatory factors.

The twopenny library: the book trade, working-class readers, and 'middlebrow' novels in Britain, 1930-42.

Twopenny libraries first appeared in North London in 1930 and quickly spread throughout urban Britain. Their innovation was to dispense with subscription fees and charge per loan. Unlike older commercial libraries such as Mudie's, twopenny libraries served a working-class clientele. Some twopenny libraries were standalone businesses. Many more were sidelines to existing businesses such as tobacconists' and newsagents' shops. Library services could be profitable in their own right, but often their main value to their proprietors was to bring customers into the shop more regularly. Established players in the book trade initially responded to twopenny libraries with alarm, but the threat they posed was limited. Their market was not the same as those of booksellers. Some public librarians made arguments along these lines about the twopenny libraries' impact on public libraries; certainly, the two types of institution coexisted. Twopenny libraries carried a lot of so-called light fiction, but they also lent working-class readers the 'middlebrow' bestsellers of the 1920s and 1930s. The wider significance of the twopenny library lies in the way it problematizes the distinction commonly made between a middle-class public for new hardcover novels and a working-class readership of fiction that appeared in cheap papers and magazines.

Coordination, Property & Intellectual Property: An Unconventional Approach to Anticompetitive Effects & Downstream Access

Countless high profile cases like the recent patent litigation threatening to shut down the BlackBerry® service have long drawn sharp criticism; and in response, most of the intellectual property (IP) literature argues for the use of weaker, or liability rule, enforcement as a tool for solving the problems of anticompetitive effects and downstream access while still providing sufficient rewards to IP creators. This paper takes an unconventional approach under which rewards don't matter much, but coordination does matter a great deal. The paper shows how stronger, or property rule, enforcement facilitates the good type of coordination that increases competition and access. The paper further shows how, paradoxically, the reforms urged by IP critics end up facilitating the different, bad type of coordination that decreases competition and access. Simply put, the paper shows how policy debates would be radically improved by consideration of these two different coordination effects. The paper follows the general approach of the field called New Institutional Economics (NIE), which has explored many problems that are triggered by different institutions of laws and norms. Because no institution is perfect, the NIE approach suggests that our choices among institutions must be informed by our views of the solutions we most want and the problems we can best mitigate or bear. The paper explores a theory of the institution of property rights backed up by property rules as playing a particular, good role in facilitating coordination among many diverse complementary users of an asset in a way that increases competition and access. Under this view, coordination is offered as an alternative to other goals that have been suggested including internalizing externalities, mitigating rent dissipation, or providing direct incentives, and property is offered as an alternative to other institutions or organizations that also can facilitate this coordination goal, including, norm communities such as open source projects, firms, and government. The paper also shows how property rights backed up by weaker, or liability rule, enforcement can play a particular, bad role in facilitating the kind of coordination among large, established players that decreases competition and access. The shift in focus towards the link between property rule treatment and coordination has several practical effects. First, it explains why many of reform proposals of yesterday and today that do not use the coordination approach should be expected to exacerbate the two key persistent problems of anticompetitive effect and reduced downstream access. Second, it explains why certain aspects of IP regimes may be working well and why others may be candidates for change or elimination. Third, it elucidates factors that cut against changing IP regimes in ways that likely will exacerbate the two key persistent problems of anticompetitive effect and reduced downstream access. Providing one example of how the coordination approach could inform practical policy discussions, the paper frames a discussion for evaluating a case against the present copyright regime.

Dominant mobile payment approaches and leading mobile payment solution providers: A review

Emerging solutions enabling consumers to pay for goods and services using mobile phones are disrupting established payments models and generating business opportunities for new and established players. This paper categorises the dominant mobile payment approaches and highlights the leading mobile payment solution providers within each segment. It identifies barriers and drivers of the mobile payment market and projects short-term and long-term growth prospects for the various mobile payment solution types. Finally, it offers guidance for payment industry players acting in the mobile payment market space.

Non‐classical membrane trafficking processes galore

Dogmatic views of how proteins and other cellular components may traffic within and between eukaryotic cells have been challenged in the past few years. Beyond the classical secretory/exocytic pathway and its established players, other pathways of cell surface membrane transport, generally termed "unconventional secretion," are now better understood. More insights have also been gleaned on the roles of secreted or shedding microvesicles, either exosomal or ectosomal in origin, in unconventional secretion. Recent works have also revealed key molecular components, particularly the Golgi reassembly stacking protein (GRASP), and the importance of stress-induced autophagy, in unconventional exocytic transport. This GRASP and autophagy-dependent (GAD) mode appears to underlie the unconventional exocytosis of many soluble and membrane cargoes. Likewise, recent findings have revealed transport processes that contrast the classically known mitochondria import, namely vesicular transport from the mitochondria to peroxisomes and lysosomes. Mitochondria-peroxisomal targeting of mitochondria-derived vesicles appears to involve the retromer complex, which was classically associated with endosome-Golgi membrane traffic. The routes of intracellular membrane transport and communications between eukaryotic organelles now appear far more complex that one would have imagined 10 years ago.

Multinationals and the Changing Rules of Competition

Our aim with this focused issue was to look at the changing environments of international business and the new challenges faced by multinational enterprises from developed markets. We were particularly interested in the appearance of emerging markets as viable markets and locations for outsourcing as well as in the increasing number of firms from these markets entering the international arena as formidable competitors. These new developments and an increasingly volatile economic environment are changing the rules of competition and are affecting the competitiveness of established players and markets. The resulting new global order is questioning extant international business paradigms and theories, and the way we conceptualize cross-border strategies. This focused issue addresses some of these challenges faced by international business research and analyses how firms both from developed and emerging markets are dealing with these new phenomena and challenges.

Disrupting Incrementalism in Health Care Innovation

To build enabling innovation frameworks for health care entrepreneurs to better identify, evaluate, and pursue entrepreneurial opportunities. Powerful frameworks have been developed to enable entrepreneurs and investors identify which opportunity areas are worth pursuing and which start-up ideas have the potential to succeed. These frameworks, however, have not been clearly defined and interpreted for innovations in health care. Having a better understanding of the process of innovation in health care allows physician entrepreneurs to innovate more successfully. A review of academic literature was conducted. Concepts and frameworks related to technology innovation were analyzed. A new set of health care specific frameworks was developed. These frameworks were then applied to innovations in various health care subsectors. Health care entrepreneurs would greatly benefit from distinguishing between incremental and disruptive innovations. The US regulatory and reimbursement systems favor incrementalism with a greater chance of success for established players. Small companies and individual groups, however, are more likely to thrive if they adopt a disruptive strategy. Disruption in health care occurs through various mechanisms as detailed in this article. While the main mechanism of disruption might vary across different health care subsectors, it is shown that disruptive innovations consistently require a component of contrarian interpretation to guarantee considerable payoff. If health care entrepreneurs choose to adopt an incrementalist approach, they need to build the risk of disruption into their models and also ascertain that they have a very strong intellectual property (IP) position to weather competition from established players. On the contrary, if they choose to pursue disruption in the market, albeit the competition will be less severe, they need to recognize that the regulatory and reimbursement hurdles are going to be very high. Thus, they would benefit from seeking market opportunities that are large enough to warrant greater regulatory and reimbursement risks.

Associations provide industry coordination and outreach in North America

Industry associations play a critical role in the nascent hydrogen and fuel cell sector, where there is a great deal of work needed to both develop and prove the technology, and to help it to break through into a wide range of applications dominated by established players with well proven technologies. Here we look at the aims and activities of the principal associations representing the fuel cell and hydrogen industry in the US and Canada, which together represent and coordinate a significant proportion of the developers and users of these clean energy technologies, at both the national level and on the global stage.

Taxation in a Time of Crisis: Policy Leadership from the OECD to the G20

After decades of directing global economic policy standards alone, the United States and Europe publicly extended leadership power to some developing countries in response to the economic crisis of 2008-2009. But an entrenched international architecture of tax policy expertise ensures that a small group of established players continue to shape tax norms and practices throughout the world. This architecture is based on historical international power relationships and institutional history. For diplomatic restructuring on the world stage to usher in a new age of inclusion for previously marginalized states and peoples, systemic changes must also take place in these entrenched institutions and processes.

Selected papers from the international conference Academic Publishing in Europe: The Impact of Publishing

The fourth APE – Academic Publishing in Europe – Conference in the Berlin Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, was about ‘the impact of publishing’. The APE 2009 spectrum varied from usage and users, peer reviewing and quality assurance, branding, funding and investing, business models, new types of information, enabling technologies, search engines, to research excellence, dissemination, access and sharing of knowledge. In this issue we present the APE 2009 Short Conference Report, written by Svenja Hagenhoff and Chris Armbruster, and we publish a relevant selection of papers from this conference. As there was simply too much material, we did not attempt to publish full proceedings this time. Most presentations can be found under ‘APE Literature’ on the APE 2009 website: www.ape2009.eu. APE Conferences encourage the debate about the future of scientific publications, information dissemination and access to scientific results. They offer an independent forum for ‘open minds’ with a free exchange of opinions and experiences between all stakeholders. Participants were: academic, educational, scientific, technological, medical, legal and professional publishers, university presses, scientists, authors, editors, librarians, teachers, learned and professional societies and associations, funding agencies, politicians and policy makers, subscription agencies and booksellers, recruiting agencies and technology providers. Academic Publishing and library activity face significant technical, financial and political challenges in the coming years. This may have major consequences for scholarly communication. Europe is the largest producer of scientific research and scholarly knowledge with a very strong publishing and library culture, with different scientific and professional cultures and a multitude of languages, but the acceptance, requirements and expectations are changing rapidly. Although the supportive role of academic organisations, societies and the private sector is subject to an intensive debate, there is a lot of uncertainty about current challenges and possibilities of the scholarly communication system, like new business models, the role of established players, funding schemes, quality and integrity of information, intellectual property, or life cycle and preservation of digital objects. Those issues are often discussed fiercely and emotionally, and there seems to be little interaction and knowledge exchange between the different players of the scholarly communication system, like librarians, publishing houses, university presses, scientists, funders and policy makers.

Voltage-gated calcium channels in chronic pain: emerging role of alternative splicing

N- and T-type voltage-gated calcium channels are key established players in chronic pain. Current work suggests that alternative splicing of these channels constitutes an important aspect in the investigation of their roles in the pathogenesis of chronic pain. Recent N-type channel studies describe a nociceptor-enriched alternatively spliced module responsible for voltage-independent G protein modulation and internalization, which is implicated in the control of distinct nociceptive pathways. On the contrary, although a large body of work has demonstrated that peripheral Cav 3.2-encoded T-type currents are involved in several types of chronic pain, little is known with respect to the expression of numerous newly discovered splice variants in specific pain pathways. The elucidation of the new layers of molecular complexity uncovered in N- and T-type channel splice variants and their respective locations and roles in different pain pathways will allow for the development of better therapeutic strategies for the treatment of chronic pain.

Old technology meets new technology: complementarities, similarities, and alliance formation

AbstractAlliance formation is commonplace in many high‐technology industries experiencing radical technological change, where established firms use alliances with new entrants to adapt to technological change, while new entrants benefit from the ability of established players to commercialize the new technology. Despite the prevalence of these alliances, we know little about how these firms choose to ally with specific firms given the range of possible partners they may choose from. This study explores factors that lead to alliance formation between pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. We focus on the alliance tie as the unit of analysis and argue that dyadic complementarities and similarities directly influence alliance formation. We then introduce a contingency model in which the positive effect of complementarities and similarities on alliance formation is moderated by the age of the new technology firm. We draw theoretical attention to the intersection between levels of analysis, in particular, the intersection between dyadic and firm‐level constructs. We find that a pharmaceutical and a biotechnology firm are more likely to enter an alliance based on complementarities when the biotechnology firm is younger. Another noteworthy finding is that proxies for broad capabilities appear to be at least as effective, if not more so, in predicting alliance formation compared to fine‐grained science and technology‐related indicators, like patent cross‐citations or patent common citations. We conclude by suggesting that future studies on alliance formation need to take into account interactions across levels; for example, how dyadic capabilities interact with firm‐level factors, and the advantages and disadvantages of more or less fine‐grained measures of organizational capabilities. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Coupling a change in intraluminal pressure to vascular smooth muscle depolarization: still stretching for an explanation

pressure-induced (myogenic) constriction of arterioles is believed to be a fundamental contributor to the local regulation of microvascular blood flow and pressure. Myogenic constriction provides a level of tone upon which vasodilators can act to lower resistance and match blood flow to metabolic

Policy design and intervention in the innovation diffusion process: The case of China’s communication sector

SummaryThe innovation diffusion process in China has varied impacts on different players in the industrial system, which can in turn either facilitate or impede theeffects of innovation diffusion. Bringing not only growth possibilities to the newcomers but also high risks to the established players, the diffusion process might encounter with huge resistance in a highly regulated system, which is also called market failure. Based on intensive case studies in China’s communication sector, the paper argues that the structures of the innovation supply system will greatly influence the innovation diffusion process. Policy-makers must leverage policy design and intervention to achieve expected strategic objectives. Therefore, proper policy intervention could become the trigger to launch and facilitate diffusion of emerging innovations in such a large developing country as China.

Orange alert [mobile virtual network operators

The article looks at the growing phenomenon of mobile network operators (MVNOs) and its impact on the cellular establishment. In the strange new world of MVNOs, the unconventional is practically the norm in more than one sense. One of the ways in which the MVNO concept breaks away from conventionalism is by allowing companies with little or no background in telecoms to become a telecoms supplier. As its name indicates, a virtual network operator does not own what for any other traditional operator is its most precious asset - a network. Whenever a new MVNO decides to start competing in a market generally dominated by a few established players, it has no choice but to partner with one of them in order to buy the airtime at wholesale rates that it then resells to its subscribers. The degree of success - or failure - awaiting every MVNO entrant depends, to a great extent, on how well the company negotiates the terms of its contract with the incumbent of choice. The article takes as an example the launch of the easyMobile MVNO.

An Exploration Of The Punctuated Equilibrium Paradigm: The Case Of Indian Low Cost Airlines

Over any resonable length of time, in any industry competition can be viewed as a process driven by innovation. By lowering the entry barriers, innovation allows new enterprises to compete with relatively established organizations. Thus the number of competitors in any industry keeps rising and falling as a function of innovation. This phenomenon, which finds its roots in evolutionary biological sciences, can be explained by "model of punctuated equilibrium". In the past explosive growths of many companies, at the expense of established players, endorse the dynamic nature of change process proposed by this model. The Indian domestic civil aviation industry is undergoing a similar change process. Thanks to an innovative strategy: Low Cost Flying. In this paper we have analyzed the defreezing of competitive structure of Indian domestic civil aviation industry to highlight how innovation affects the degree and nature of competition in an industry.

An Exploration Of The Punctuated Equilbrium Paradigm: The Case Of Indian Low Cost Airlines

Over any resonable length of time, in any industry competition can be viewed as a process driven by innovation. By lowering the entry barriers, innovation allows new enterprises to compete with relatively established organizations. Thus the number of competitors in any industry keeps rising and falling as a function of innovation. This phenomenon, which finds its roots in evolutionary biological sciences, can be explained by ‘model of punctuated equilibrium’. In the past explosive growths of many companies, at the expense of established players, endorse the dynamic nature of change process proposed by this model. The Indian domestic civil aviation industry is undergoing a similar change process. Thanks to an innovative strategy: Low Cost Flying. In this paper we have analyzed the defreezing of competitive structure of Indian domestic civil aviation industry to highlight how innovation affects the degree and nature of competition in an industry

Competing with Mr. Postman: Business Strategies, Industry Structure, and Competitive Prices in Liberalized Letter Markets

Letter markets are still highly regulated in most countries. Some countries, such as those of the European Union, plan to liberalize letter markets within this decade. Competition will provide many new challenges and opportunities for established and new players. In this paper we analyze business strategies and the resulting industry structure in liberalized letter markets. We describe the economic characteristics of the industry and identify business models for new competitors. To predict the industry structure, we construct a game-theoretic model, which takes into account the relevant segments and geographic differences of the letter market. The model allows us to compute equilibrium prices, market shares, and profits for the incumbent and entrants. We can thus assess the different strategies. Although we calibrate our model with German data, our results are general and can be applied to other countries with similar characteristics, such as France, the U.K., and to some extent even the U.S.

The muscle drain, coubertobin‐type taxes and the international transfer system in association football

This paper is a response to the proposal by Andreff (2001) that a Coubertobin tax be levied on the international movement of athletes and players from developing countries in order to restrict the “muscle drain” from these countries. It is argued that the recent changes in the international transfer system in association football can be viewed as a first attempt at implementing a Coubertobin‐type tax through training compensation and the solidarity principle. In addition there are strict regulations for the international transfer of minors. It is further argued that a Coubertobin‐type tax cannot (and should not be used to) prevent the economic migration of established athletes and players. Rather it should be used to ensure adequate compensation in order to encourage the local training and development of young athletes and players.

Coopérations industrielles et positionnement concurrentiel : application aux marchés financiers organisés

Financial exchanges have been experiencing a complete upsetting of their environment: deregulation and technological progress have enhanced competitive pressures, both between established players and from new entrants. Exchanges have therefore implemented numerous strategic actions to face new constraints and opportunities. In particular, industrial co-operative agreements have recently been on the increase and involve growing degree of co-ordination. This article highlights the changes that have allowed and motivated this evolution. It also characterises, with information collected on financial exchanges (both cash and derivatives) in Europe and in the United States between 1996 and 2000, the various forms of co-operation. We first look at strategic co-operation between competitors, aimed at influencing market structure and lessening the degree of competition. We then analyse vertical partnership, both between exchanges and between exchanges and industrial partners, i.e. private service providers, financial institutions or ATSs (alternative trading Systems). It appears that co-operation, while offering benefits in terms of costs and services provided, also allows exchanges to build new competitive advantages, through network economies and diversification.