Narrow Results

This review examines 43 recent papers about factors behind success and failure of innovative projects. Nine out of the 43 papers report a larger number of possible causes for success or failure and provide some rank ordering. Analyzing these rankings we find that the nine studies have a significant degree of similarity among the ten highest-ranking success factors; however, there is little similarity among lower ranking factors. The various studies remain either inconsistent or inconclusive with respect to factors such as strength of competition, R&D intensity, the degree to which a project is "innovative" or "technologically advanced" and top management support. Agreement exists, however, about the positive impact on innovative success of factors such as firm culture, experience with innovation, the multidisciplinary character of the R&D team and explicit recognition of the collective character of the innovation process or the advantages of the matrix organization.

In this paper, we prove necessary and sufficient conditions for the viability for an impulsive stochastic functional differential inclusion driven by a fractional Brownian motion. The viable property is of interest since it reflects the stability of the model under consideration. The fractional Brownian motion provides a memory effect to the model. Whereas, the appearance of the impulsive factor introduces jumps to the solutions and is new to the analysis of this type. Hence our results are new even in the special case of stochastic differential equation setting.

In a numéraire-independent framework, we study a financial market with $N$ assets which are all treated in a symmetric way. We define the fundamental value ^∗S of an asset $S$ as its super-replication price and say that the market has a strong bubble if ^∗S and $S$ deviate from each other. None of these concepts needs any mention of martingales. Our main result then shows that under a weak absence-of-arbitrage assumption (basically NUPBR), a market has a strong bubble if and only if in all numéraire s for which there is an equivalent local martingale measure (ELMM), asset prices are strict local martingales under all possible ELMMs. We show by an example that our bubble concept lies strictly between the existing notions from the literature. We also give an example where asset prices are strict local martingales under one ELMM, but true martingales under another, and we show how our approach can lead naturally to endogenous bubble birth.

The low-intensity ultrasound effects on MCF7 (human breast adenocarcinoma) and MCF10A (healthy breast cells) have been investigated at different sonication protocol to probe the effectiveness and the selectivity of the ultrasound (US) treatment and to understand the implications between cell mortality, biomechanical interactions and cell elastic modulus. Experiments performed at fixed and variable frequency demonstrated the effectiveness of some protocols in killing carcinogenic cells and the healthy cells insensitivity. Variation of elastic properties of MCF7 cells exposed to US under varying sonication conditions was examined. Sonication was carried out at fixed frequency (as it is usually done in therapy protocols), between 400kHz and 620kHz, following two protocols: (i) at fixed power output; (ii) at fixed voltage of the US generator. Evolution of cell stiffness during the US treatment was monitored via atomic force spectroscopy (AFS). It was found that cell mortality has a similar trend of variation with respect to sonication frequency regardless of the way specimens are exposed to US. Mechanical properties do not show a uniform trend with respect to frequency, but variations of Young’s modulus are more marked near the very low (400–480) kHz or very high frequencies (580–620) kHz. The observed variations may be related to mechanical interactions occurring in the cell culture, suggesting a primacy of the environment on other factors.

Primary agricultural cooperative societies (PACSs) are the bases of cooperative credit structure in India. The cooperative credit structure functioning in Maharashtra state has three tiers. The main function of the PACSs is to provide short- and medium-term credit to its members. PACSs play a vital role in the socio-economic development of its members. Finance is the key to all types of activities. The efficient management of any society depends on the efficient management of finance. PACSs being financial intermediaries provide financial service with the objective of growth and profit. In the era of globalisation, PACSs face a different type of challenge which raises questions about the viability and sustainability of PACSs. A low resource base has been a major constraint in the effective functioning of PACSs. Financial stability has a direct bearing on the deposit mobilisation and overdue reduction. Limited resources result in low business activity. Limited resources, an increase in nonperforming asset, low recovery, overdue, lack of finance and lack of diversification have affected the viability of primary agricultural societies. Besides providing agriculture credit, some PACSs in Pune District are engaged in diversified activities. The PACSs that have diversified their business are more viable and sustain better than non-diversified societies. This chapter reports the viability analysis of selected PACSs in the Pune District. Multi-stage sampling technique was used. The primary and secondary data were mixed together. Primary data were collected with the help of specially designed schedules by conducting interviews, and secondary data were collected from different published sources and annual reports of PACSs. The study concludes that, as a result of the diversification, Talegoan Dhamdhere PACS in Shirur Block is potentially viable as compared to the Bhairawnath Kasarsai PACS in Mulshi Block of Pune District.

This paper deals with inertia functions in control theory introduced in Aubin, Bernardo and Saint-Pierre (2004, 2005) and their adaptation to dynamical games. The inertia function associates with any initial state-control pair the smallest of the worst norms over time of the velocities of the controls regulating viable evolutions. For tychastic systems (parameterized systems where the parameters are tyches, disturbances, perturbations, etc.), the palicinesia of a tyche measure the worst norm over time of the velocities of the tyches. The palicinesia function is the largest palicinesia threshold c such that all evolutions with palicinesia smaller than or equal to c are viable. For dynamical games where one parameter is the control and the other one is a tyche (games against nature or robust control), we define the guaranteed inertia function associated with any initial state-control-tyche triple the best of the worst of the norms of the velocities of the controls and of the tyches and study their properties. Viability Characterizations and Hamilton-Jacobi equations of which these inertia and palicinesia functions are solutions are provided.

Viability theory can be applied for determining viable capture basin for control problem in presence of uncertainty. We first recall the concepts of viability theory which allow to develop numerical methods for computing viable capture basin for control problems and guaranteed control problems. Recent developments of option pricing in the framework of dynamical games with constraints lead to the formulation of guaranteed valuation in terms of guaranteed viable-capture basin of a dynamical game. As an application we show how the viability/capturability algorithm evaluates and manages portfolios. Regarding viability/capturability issues, stochastic control is a particular use of tychastic control. We replace the standard translation of uncertainty by stochastic control problem by tychastic ones and the concept of stochastic viability by the one of guaranteed viability kernel. Considering the Cox–Rubinstein model, we extend algorithms for hedging portfolios in the presence of transaction costs and dividends using recent developments on hybrid calculus.

Viable sets in multi-valued dynamics, generated by finite families of mappings, are considered. In the case of affine Iterated Function Systems, satisfying a generalized cone condition, the existence of compact viable sets is stated, and some topological characteristics of these sets are given.