Over the last twenty years, the topic of opportunities has received an increased interest, which is not surprising given that it lies at the heart of entrepreneurship research. The business creation process is basically an opportunity development process, starting from the first glimpse of the entrepreneur’s idea and continuing until the exploitation of the opportunity. Currently, there is minimal amount of research looking at the process of opportunity development as a whole, no research investigating the opportunity as a unit of analysis and looking in-depth into what happens to the opportunity during the gestation period of a business. Opportunities are objective entities that are subjective to the entrepreneur as he or she is the one recognizing opportunities and acting upon pursuing them. In this thesis we combine more theories and separate the opportunity development process into three main stages, which are recognition, objectification and enactment and investigate each of them in-depth. We also look at how shaping or refinement is being done during the development process and how social networks influence this process.

Nanotechnology is an emerging field of engineering. Awareness needs to be fostered in the K-12 education system in order to sustain its expansion. As a current Algebra 1 teacher, I participated in the NASCENT research program to further my education in nanotechnology and find ways to integrate this content and practices in my Science Technology Engineering and Math (STEM) based Algebra 1 curriculum. During the research, I learned about surface tension of solids and liquids and its effects on materials' wetting properties. After completing the research program, I created a 2-week long project where students will replicate my experiences during this research. The purpose of this report is to investigate the need for the integration of nanotechnology in STEM classes and find ways to turn my research experience into real-world learning opportunities for my students. / text

Nascent Dreams (2012) is a work for full orchestra that explores the elasticity of form as musical analogy. In a programmatic context, each thematic section can be interpreted as representing landscapes or events encountered while dreaming. Listeners are privy to the nascency of each section before the music whisks one away to the next soundscape. Musically, the work emphasizes melody and lyricism in order to establish a song-like quality throughout.

This study contributes to nascent entrepreneurship research by investigating factors on the individual and opportunity levels of analysis that determine the exploitation of innovative venture ideas. As a result of the literature review three theoretical perspectives were chosen to organize the factors: human and social capital, entrepreneurial self-efficacy, and domain definition strategy. The analysis of the chosen factors is based on hypotheses formulated on the basis of the literature review concerning the impact of the factors on the performance of nascent entrepreneurs during the discovery process. Empirical data were collected from the survey of 409 nascent entrepreneurs who addressed a public advisory agency in Stockholm area. Research findings show that among all factors, statistically significant predictors of exploitation of venture ideas are social capital in terms of the contact with counselors and number of ties with different actors, planning and marshaling self-efficacy, initial investment, tangibility and innovativeness of the future offerings. As for the direction of relationships, too many ties with different networks and higher planning self-efficacy influence exploitation in a negative way. Among variables related to domain definition strategy, entrepreneurs with innovative venture ideas based on services have higher probability of exploiting their ideas. Those who have made initial investment into the development of venture ideas and have a frequent contact with counselors are more likely to continue exploitation efforts. Of five dimensions of entrepreneurial self-efficacy, higher marshaling self-efficacy was shown to positively contribute to the exploitation process. It is especially difficult during the early stages of entrepreneurial process to predict which venture ideas will survive, thus, nascent entrepreneurship assistance should encourage experimentation. Although it is difficult to make generalizations from the study about nascent entrepreneurs in the Stockholm area, it can be advised to encourage the development of new services and enhance the entrepreneurial potential of nascent entrepreneurs by developing their entrepreneurial self-efficacy, especially marshaling self-efficacy.

Establishing a definitive cell cycle progression has been one of the fundamental aims of cellular biology. Its importance lies in gaining insight into the basic processes of life as well as the functions of mutant cell cycle pathways in promoting cancer by replication deficiencies and loss of checkpoint control. Currently used methods to control cell cycle and synchronize cells, function by halting cell cycle progression. Such harsh methods are detrimental to the cell and insufficient to provide an accurate reflection of the cell cycle. This study focused on replicating and confirming the efficiency of a technique developed by Helmstetter, called the “Baby Machine,” that can produce new born cells with little to no perturbations. Using this in conjunction with a short pulse RNA labelling technique, called Bru-seq, allowed the capture and RNA sequencing of synchronized cells and its nascent RNA. Here we show the first glimpse into the transcriptional profile of newly divided cells as well as novel rapid exon splicing and transcription read-through processes.

No description available.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate the activities that nascent firms undertake to improve customer attractiveness and gain collaborative commitment from strategic suppliers. Design/methodology/approach: Data from a grounded theory study consisting of 26 participants from 15 firms and a review of extant literature were used to develop a theoretical model that explains how a nascent firm increases its customer attractiveness to elicit commitment and collaboration from strategic suppliers. Findings: The authors find that social capital, born of close social ties and social history, enhances the effectiveness of a nascent firm's relationship-building practices. This counteracts a supplier's collaborative risk and consequently increases the nascent firm's customer attractiveness, thus enabling it to obtain strategic supplier collaborative commitment. Practical implications: This research helps managers by providing direction on what practices nascent firms pursue to gain strategic supplier resources and collaboration. Given the reality of resource constraints in nascent firms, it is suggested that this insight is essential to obtaining crucial external resources needed to survive and grow. Originality/value: Extant research on buyer–supplier collaboration is mostly confined to the context of mature firms and does not account for the unique inter-organizational relational challenges faced by nascent firms. This research uncovers the idiosyncrasies of supplier management in nascent firms, and elucidates on the actions that nascent firm managers take to gain supplier collaborative commitment.

No description available.

My dissertation is a study of firms’ strategic differences and the performance consequences of these differences in nascent industries. I relax the implicit assumption in the existing literature that a technological breakthrough is exogenous, and provide theoretical and empirical accounts of knowledge evolution before a new technology gets commercialized. In Chapter 2, I highlight the evolution of a technology at the industry level and argue that there exists a pre-commercialization technology life cycle. I develop a series of propositions related to the technology’s architectural evolution during the pre-commercialization phase, and show that an emerging architecture becomes fully integrated before the inception of a new market. In Chapter 3, I shift the focus to the firm level, and compare the pre-commercialization search strategies of market incumbents facing a technological obsolescence to those of technology incumbents disrupting an existing market. I show that these two groups of incumbent firms invest heavily in an emerging technology even before the market takes shape, and that they engage in different search strategies, specifically in the degree to which they integrate or modularize the knowledge about individual technology components across two stages of a pre-commercialization life cycle. In Chapter 4, I argue that such pre-commercialization strategies have post-commercialization consequences. This dynamic view suggests that a select group of established organizations enter a new product market and the heterogeneity in their pre-entry experiences has direct consequences for the product’s initial performance. Throughout, this study uses the emergence of the solid-state lighting (SSL) market as an empirical context. / Business Administration/Strategic Management

Examensarbetet inom civilekonomiprogrammet syftar till att bidra med kunskap om främjandet av företagande och utifrån offentliga sektorns perspektiv identifiera faktorer som har mer eller mindre möjlighet att påverka företagandet i Sverige. Vidare har det lagts betoning på de olika faktorerna som är synliga i främjandet av företagande för att kunna analysera huruvida det på lokal nivå går att påverka näringslivet ur ett kommunalt perspektiv. Regeringens målsättning är att kommuner fungerar effektivt inom gränserna av valfrihet och medbestämmande. I Sveriges välfärdssystem finns det en hög ambitionsnivå, men det ger varierande resultat beroende på vilken kommun som diskuteras. När det gäller andra delar av förvaltning har kommunerna krav eller regler som påverkar hur organisationen utformas, men dessa finns i mindre omfattning när det kommer till näringslivet. Det finns en hel del studier i ämnet, men det har enligt vår uppfattning funnits en brist i informationen som finns synlig angående hur utvecklingen ser ut från företagande till att aktivt starta företag med hjälp och förutsättningar från kommunen. Uppsatsen är en kvalitativ fallstudie, där det insamlade materialet har utgått från grundad teori och konceptuell forskning. Metoden som använts var telefonintervjuer med olika kommuner. En sammanställning gjordes sedan till mindre beskrivningar av attribut som anses viktiga av respondenterna. Resultatet är en redogörelse av intervjuerna och en jämförelse mellan kommuner i relation till företagande. Utifrån uppsatsen och undersökningen har vi fått mer insikt i vad som kan påverka förutsättningar i näringslivet och att det ligger en del problematik i hur den institutionella strukturen allokerar uppgifter utan att ge organisationer befogenhet att påverka förutsättningarna för individen i samhället. Det bör vara mer tydligt huruvida främjandet av nyföretagande är en statlig eller kommunal prioritering. Arbetet med främjande åtgärder av företagande kan med fördel bli mer tydlig och ett hållbarhetstänk kan vara en bättre utgångspunkt snarare än antalet startade företag. / The thesis aims to contribute to knowledge in the promotion of nascent entrepreneurship and from the public sectors perspective identify factors that have more or less opportunity to influence how starting businesses is encouraged in Sweden. In addition to this it aims to discuss visible factors in an encouraging business region and how municipalities work within these limits. The Government's objective is for municipalities to function effectively within the limits of Swedish rules for municipalities. In the Swedish welfare system, there is a high level of ambition, with varying results depending on which municipality is being analysed. When it comes to how the business climate is structured, the municipalities lack rules or requirements. There are a lot of studies on the subject, but in our opinion, there is a lack of transparency in the development of creating an encouraging business environment in Sweden. The thesis is a qualitative case study, where the collected material has been based on theory and conceptual research. The method used was telephone interviews with various respondents from different municipalities. A summary is then presented with attributes that were considered important by the respondents. The result of the performed interviews shows the operational work within the municipality, correlating with the business world. From the study we have gained more insight into what can affect the process of encouraging businesses in municipalities. Furthermore, it became visible that there might be a shortage in institutional structure, because of deficient regional power when it comes to allocating conditions to an encouraging business climate. Perhaps it could benefit the matter of increasing businesses if the objective was more pronouncedly exalted, as to whether it is a governmental or municipality priority. The promotion of entrepreneurship could possibly be clearer and perhaps benefit from more of a sustainability perspective rather than the number of companies started.