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Does growing reliance on private military and security companies (PMSCs) lead to the re-configuration of the state as a security and defence actor in Europe? Building on the multiple-networks-approach in organisation theory (Padgett and Powell), the current paper develops an analytical approach for studying the rise of new organizational forms in interstitial spaces via mechanisms including extension and differentiation; fusion and hybridity; transposition and refunctionality; and multivocality. The empirical analysis focuses on the rules and practices of Vesper Group - a PMSC working closely with the Swedish government. Several findings are reported. First, a new organizational form seems to be emerging as a result of the ongoing multiple network dynamics – national defence entrepreneurial firm. This is a type of a firm different from mainstream PMSCs in that it is owned by venture capital companies from their home state and also in that it is closely associated with its respective state in terms of its personnel policies, expertise and operational goals and scope. Second, the case of Sweden's Vesper Group and its cooperation with the Swedish government indicates that some EU member states may also be in the process of structural and institutional mutation as providers of defence and crisis management capabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most entrepreneurs seek VC funding after the reward-based crowdfunding campaign succeeds, and venture capitalists (VCs) can contribute to the project in two aspects: investment and operational expertise. With a game-theoretical model, we find that entrepreneurs face twelve possible scenarios contingent on the mass market revenue and revenue share, including the six scenarios wherein neither side exerts effort to complete the project. To attract VC funding and ensure the project completion after a campaign success, entrepreneurs should set the funding goal above a certain threshold. Specifically, we identify three ranges of the revenue share and derive the lower bound for the funding goal in each range. However, we notice that entrepreneurs prefer a low funding goal to promise the campaign success and the optimal goal will be the lower bound in each range. Moreover, we show that the revenue share is decisive to the role of VCs in the project. If the entrepreneur's share exceeds a high threshold, the venture capitalist becomes a pure investor with no incentive to exert effort, similar to the role of banks; if the share is less than a low threshold, the entrepreneur won't follow up but transfers the project, and the VC investor will be a project owner; if the share stays medium, the VC investor acts as a partner and there may exist "free-riding". In the extension, we consider the revenue share an endogenous and analyse the role of VCs further. Interestingly, the VC investor prefers to own the project and occupy all revenue in mass market, while the entrepreneur treats the inefficient venture capitalist as a pure investor and the efficient one as a partner. In addition, when cooperating with efficient VCs, the entrepreneur is more likely to enlarge her share as the mass market revenue increases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The last 25 years have witnessed the emergence of the International Branch Campus (IBC) as a means of providing Transnational Higher Education (TNE). The growth in the number of IBCs has not been without examples of failure and in some cases controversy, necessitating informed decision-making on the part of university leaders contemplating such a venture. Based on a systematic review of literature concerning the motivations for establishing IBCs; the drivers of sustainability and longevity; and case studies of successful and unsuccessful ventures by UK universities, this paper identifies key characteristics of successful IBCs. It proposes a framework – combining strategic, leadership, academic, financial and operational factors – for use by decision-makers in determining whether to establish and how to manage an IBC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agassi's radical skepticism leads to the following practical suggestion: When investors consider the likelihood that a suggested innovation will materialize, they should refer to the question: does this idea (that this innovation materializes) raise or reduce the strangeness of the world? And to answer this question, they should examine if the suggested technology is consistent with accepted scientific theories, and if it explains unexpected phenomena. This recommended method is not based on Bayesian epistemology but on a psychological theory of beliefs consistent with skepticism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do inter-organizational networks emerge? We address this question using an equilibrium framework where firms' decisions to form links with other firms are modeled as a strategic game. In this game, firms weigh the costs and benefits of establishing a relationship with other firms and form ties if their net payoffs are positive. We characterize the equilibrium networks as exponential random graphs (ERGM), and we estimate the firms' payoffs using a Bayesian approach. We apply the framework to a co-investment network of venture capital firms in the medical device industry, providing economic interpretations ERGM parameter estimates. We learn that firms rely on their joint partners (transitivity) and prefer to form ties with firms similar to themselves (homophily). These results hold after controlling for the interdependence among ties. Our structural approach allows us to simulate the effects of economic shocks or policy counterfactuals. We test two such policy shocks, namely, firm entry and regulatory change. We show that while entry of few firms does not have meaningful effects on the shape of the network, a regulatory shock of minimum capital requirements increases the co-investment network's density and clustering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Venture capitalists (“VCs”) are increasingly abandoning their traditional role as monitors of their portfolio companies. They are giving startup founders more equity and control and promising not to replace them with outside executives. At the same time, startups are taking unprecedented risks—defying regulators, scaling in unsustainable ways, and racking up billion-dollar losses. These trends raise doubts about the dominant model of VC behavior, which claims that VCs actively monitor startups to reduce the risk of moral hazard and adverse selection. We propose a new theory in which VCs use their role in corporate governance to persuade risk-averse founders to pursue high-risk strategies. VCs are motivated to take risks because most of the gains in venture funds come from the exponential growth of one or two outlier companies. By contrast, founders are reluctant to gamble because they bear firm-specific risk that cannot be diversified. To compensate founders for their risk exposure, VCs offer an implicit bargain in which the founders agree to pursue high-risk strategies and, in exchange, the VCs provide them private benefits. VCs can promise to give founders early liquidity when their startup grows, job security when it struggles, and a soft landing if it fails. In our model, VCs who develop a founder-friendly reputation have a competitive advantage in ex ante pricing but are more exposed to poor performance ex post due to suboptimal monitoring. Stakeholders who are not party to the VC-founder bargain—and society at large—are forced to bear uncompensated risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores experiences of temporary labor migration that entailed Yugoslav export of know-how (highly skilled knowledge and expertise) between 1980 and 1991, a result of industrial collaboration between Mining and Smelting Combine Bor, a state-owned copper-processing 'giant' in former Yugoslavia, and the biggest copper company in Iran, National Iranian Copper Industries Company. Based on interviews with individuals engaged in the Yugoslav project, supplemented by analysis of documents and historic newspapers from that period, the paper analyzes everyday practices of managerial bureaucratic improvisations and improvisations at work. The article shows how such improvisations helped overcome excessive and rigid Yugoslav socialist bureaucracy and made Yugoslav entrepreneurial capitalist ventures possible. Moreover, it argues that the export of know-how was constitutive of silent acceptances of reproduction of capitalist relations, which helped consolidate the process of liberalization of the socialist market in the late 1980s. We argue that such temporary labor migration and the often improvised work carried out by the Yugoslav workers cannot be seen as a resistance or alternative to the Western/Northern hegemonies. Rather, we argue that such practices were facilitators of the capitalist ventures at semi-peripheries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ensuring biotech companies are sufficiently capitalized to propel innovation and development remains a central focus for management. In this article, we draw on our broad perspective interacting with venture capitalists to offer thoughts on investor feedback. Understanding venture capitalists' mindsets and investment theses will increase the probability of securing needed capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lawmakers, technologists, and thought leaders are facing a once-in-a-generation opportunity to build equity into the digital infrastructure that will power our lives; we argue for a two-pronged approach to seize that opportunity. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is poised to radically transform our world, but we are already seeing evidence that theoretical concerns about potential bias are now being borne out in the market. To change this trajectory and ensure that development teams are focused explicitly on creating equitable AI, we argue that we need to shift the flow of investment dollars. Venture Capital (VC) firms have an outsized impact in determining which innovations will scale, we argue that influencing how these firms allocate the capital in their funds can ensure that issues of equity are top of mind for development teams. To shift the flow of investment dollars, we propose a two-pronged approach that will address two core drivers of the flow of investment: intellectual property (IP) and diversity. Our current IP system incentivizes a lack of transparency in the AI space frustrating attempts by third parties to assess whether AI-powered products and services are inequitable. And the current demographic makeup of VC firms and companies within the AI investment environment are out of sync with the general population, which can have negative downstream effects in terms of bias in AI. To change the existing dynamic, we argue for 1. creating a fifth category of IP for data and AI that would exchange ownership for compliance with a human rights framework and 2. establishing a tax incentive for VC firms graded favorably on our commitment index. Our approach is designed to create an equitable ecosystem of sorts, one that both necessitates and encourages equitable AI from conception to implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under the designation "platform urbanism," there is growing scholarly recognition that platform intermediaries are reconfiguring urban industries, processes, and relationships through the collection and manipulation of big data. Central to realizing this economic project is financial speculation on platforms' ability to coordinate network effects—a phenomenon in which the more users there are in a networked system, the more valuable and useful it becomes. In this paper, I argue that while the existing literature recognizes the importance of network effects, it has also adopted a limited conceptualization that understands platform firms as the primary agents generating and capturing the economic benefits of network effects. Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Greater Jakarta, Indonesia, I work to expand this understanding through attention to the social lives of network effects—the ways in which platform architectures are always embedded in social relations created and sustained in everyday urban life. I show how ride-hailing drivers have attempted to mitigate the risks of their work through building socio-technical networks of their own, for their own purposes. Doing so reveals that it is not only platform firms and venture capital that speculate on network effects; rather, a range of actors in the city-region seek to tap into driver networks to advance their own social, political, and economic ends. In conclusion, I suggest that attending to these practices opens up space to reframe platform urbanism beyond its current preoccupation with macro political economic analyses, while also establishing new lines of inquiry for "speculative urbanism." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2000 and 2012, the US Congress charged the National Research Council (NRC) to study how the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program had stimulated technological innovation and used small businesses to meet Federal research and development needs and to recommend program improvements. Using project data collected by the NRC, we suggest that an important assessment metric not previously considered by the NRC in its reports to Congress relates to the failure rate of funded Phase II research projects. We identify a number of covariates associated with project failure, and we recommend that program managers might decrease the likelihood of project failure if funded firms can be given relevant information about how to contact angel investors, venture capitalists, private investors, and the like, and how to present a proposal for additional research investment dollars. Our findings should have a direct benefit to other countries that have implemented SBIR-like programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Start-up accelerators have attracted increasing attention from start-ups in recent years. However, little is known about how they interact with start-ups and investors, how they prioritize a wide variety of their services, and how macro-level factors affect their performance. We use a game-theoretic approach to study mutual effects between an accelerator, a venture capitalist (VC), and start-ups. In the model, the accelerator selects start-ups and invests in them. During its program, it provides intensive mentorship for the selected start-ups and screens them to determine whether or not they are successful. Finally, it introduces successful start-ups to the VC to obtain financing for their ideas. Our results indicate that 1) the most vital role of an accelerator is its screening services. 2) Given limited resources of accelerators, prioritizing their services is the key to their efficacy. Screening, mentorship, and seed investment services possess the first, second, and third priorities, respectively. 3) Although accelerators are anywhere beneficial, macro-level heterogeneity of entrepreneurial ecosystems is associated to their efficacy. Their efficacy is higher (lower) in less (more) developed regions. 4) Institutional reforms targeting mentoring or entrepreneurial communities are unexpectedly detrimental to the efficacy of accelerators, while they may enhance start-ups’ equilibrium willingness to participate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's venture capital (VC) industry has experienced rapid growth over the past two decades and plays an increasingly important role in economic growth. Although venture capital firms (VCF) have local bias, intercity VC investment has a growing proportion and is gradually forming a nationwide network. Preferential attachment is an important mechanism in the evolutionary process of networks, while path dependence in evolutionary economic geography provides another perspective for the spatial distribution of economic activities. As for intercity VC networks, which is more important: preferential attachment or path dependence? To answer this question, this study designed three scenarios to simulate the evolution of China's intercity VC network and then validated the simulations through the index of quadratic assignment procedure and comparison of spatial distribution. The first and second scenarios included only the single effects of preferential attachment and path dependence, respectively, while the third combined both effects. The results show that both preferential attachment and path dependence significantly affected intercity VC networks. Moreover, the combination of the two mechanisms could better simulate the network structures. Compared with path dependence, preferential attachment has presented better simulation performance since 2008, indicating a more important role in the network evolution. • Evaluating preferential attachment and path dependence in the intercity VC network • Simulating the evolution of China's intercity VC network • Examining the spatiotemporal changes in the impact of preferential attachment and path dependence • Integrating mechanisms of preferential attachment and path dependence [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Until recently, most startups that grew to become valuable businesses chose to become public companies. In the last decade, the number of unicorns--private, venture-backed startups valued over one billion dollars--has increased more than tenfold. Some of these unicorns committed misconduct that they successfully concealed for years. The difficulty of trading private company securities facilitates the concealment of misconduct. The opportunity to profit from trading a company's securities gives short sellers, analysts, and financial journalists incentives to uncover and reveal information about misconduct the company commits. Securities regulation and standard contract provisions restrict the trading of private company securities, which undermines the deterrence of private company misconduct. This Article proposes a three-pronged plan to encourage trading in private company securities, without compromising investor protection. First, reform section 12(g) of the Exchange Act so that companies are no longer forced to go public when they acquire 2000 accredited investor shareholders. Second, attach a regulatory most-favored-nation clause to private company securities so that companies may not grant the right to resell selectively. Third, require that private companies with tradable securities make limited public disclosures. These reforms would create a new market for trading unicorn securities and strengthen deterrence of unicorn misconduct. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital innovation has been widely considered as a key solution to the current journalism crisis. While most innovation projects in democratic regimes receive funding from media organizations, venture capital firms, and foundations, many of China's digital journalism projects are funded and led by the state—a model we define as "state-preneurship." In this study, we compare this model with other digital innovation models on three dimensions: the amount and sustainability of funding, the extent of newsroom restructuring, and the transformation of journalistic culture. We focus on the early national success case, Shanghai-based news outlet Pengpai, as well as on eight of its regional copycats. Based on interviews with forty-three executives, journalists, propaganda officials, media investors, and scholars, we argue that while in the short run, state-preneurship has produced fast and large-scale transformations in the digital journalism industry, these changes appear as largely unsustainable in the long run. This is due to (1) the political contingency of state investments and (2) the limited transformation in journalistic culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Venture capital firms are always faced with insufficient information and insufficient time when evaluating whether startups are worth investing in. This paper focuses on how to combine the public information of startups with the decision tree algorithm to assist investors in project screening. By extracting the public information of 1104 AI and big data companies from January 2016 to June 2017 and the financing progress in the following 18 months, this paper finds that: the six indicators of having a working background in well-known companies, being reported by well-known media, having patents and being invested by excellent institutions, working experience is highly related to this venture, and having well-known financing consultants can effectively help investors screen out projects that can obtain sustainable financing, that is, high potential projects. Considering the problem of data availability in the real world, combined with industry experience, this paper makes a more detailed variable mining for semistructured information, such as the team resume of start-ups, and selects a decision tree algorithm that is insensitive to missing values and has strong interpretability to amplify the value of fragmented information. Finally, by the improvement of the algorithm, a project screening model that can meet the needs of investment practice is designed, and the fusion mode of public information and private information is discussed, which has a more complete guiding significance for optimizing investment work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The problem of goodwill bubbles is an important issue concerned by the current capital market. It is of great significance to explore the influencing factors of goodwill bubbles for effectively inhibiting goodwill bubbles and preventing and resolving financial risks. Taking A-share companies listed from 2014 to 2018 in China as samples, this study empirically tests the impact of venture capital institutions on M&A goodwill bubbles. We find that, compared with nonventure capital shareholding companies, the scale of M&A excess goodwill of venture capital shareholding companies is lower. That is, venture capital institutions can effectively inhibit M&A goodwill bubbles. The research on the impact mechanism shows that the inhibition of venture capital institutions on the M&A goodwill bubbles is mainly realized by reducing information asymmetry and easing agency conflict. Further research shows that, from the perspective of the participation of venture capital institutions, the higher the shareholding of venture capital institutions and the greater the number of venture capital institutions investing in the same company, the more they can inhibit M&A goodwill bubbles. From the perspective of internal and external governance environment, venture capital institutions are more able to inhibit M&A goodwill bubbles in enterprises with poor quality of internal control and marketization level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Article addresses the potentially negative implications of proposed antitrust legislation on the entrepreneurial ecosystem in general, with a particular focus on the venture capitalists (VCs) that fund it. First, it offers a review of how antitrust merger law currently works and how proposed legislative changes to antitrust may threaten the innovative Venture Capital (VC)-backed ecosystem that has made the United States the center of global innovation across many different industries. Accompanying this review are some empirical observations. Second, recognizing that the understanding of innovative entrepreneurial activity calls for a deep appreciation of those who back it, the Article also provides an overview of the entrepreneurial ecosystem and VCs' motivations within this niche environment. In so doing, the Article identifies the drivers of entrepreneurial innovation and explains why changes to merger law may threaten these models of facilitating innovative, growth-orientated entrepreneurs. Finally, the Article concludes that changes to merger law may negatively affect the entire entrepreneurial ecosystem and hinder innovation in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Venture capital is a unique source of funding for innovative firms because they have limited access to traditional capital markets. Regarding VCF's point of view, start-up portfolio selection and VCF' syndication have always been critical challenges. Hence, using integrated quantitative methods to get the best-known solutions is always being felt. In this paper, start-up portfolio selection is simulated which is more similar to real-world problems rather than other research. Regarding this goal, preferences of start-ups and their interaction with investors are considered. Concerning the complexity of the problem, the best-known model to simulate this problem is an agent-based model with fuzzy inference system core as a computational engine and also the problem optimization is done using a harmony search algorithm. By this procedure, not only the portfolio's ROI is maximized but also VCF' syndication and their share is determined. Finally, several numerical illustrations are implemented and comparisons are performed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The involvement of venture capitalism within dance education in China is rapidly increasing, leading to significant shifts in understandings and practices of dance education as a private business. This article, therefore, explores this nexus of dance and the economy, advancing discussions from the commercialisation of dance education to the commodification of dance education. Drawing on a qualitative, ethnographic study of private dance schools in the rapidly expanding and economically prosperous city of Chengdu, we gather the perspectives and experiences of dance educators and venture capitalists. As they share their understandings of the commodification of ballet education, we focus on how such commodification is affecting dance education practices. Drawing on the experiences of our interviewees, we explore how capital is perceived to increase competition, which in turn brings a stronger consumer-orientation, which gives rise to expectations of certification from dance teaching. Through this critical analysis of the experiences and concerns of dance educators and venture capitalists, this research contributes to understandings of the interrelation between dance and economy in China. Given China's growing economic, political and cultural influence across the globe, this presents an urgent consideration for finance and the future of dance education around the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Because time is a key determinant of entrepreneurial decision making, time-to-event models are ubiquitous in entrepreneurship. Widespread econometric misconception, however, may cause complicated biases in existing studies. The reason is spurious duration dependency, a complicated form of endogeneity caused by unobserved heterogeneity, which is particularly pronounced in entrepreneurship data. This article discusses the endogeneity problem and methods to 'debias' time-to-event models in entrepreneurship. Simulations and empirical evidence indicate that only the frailty approach yields consistently unbiased parameter estimates. An application to start-up firms' time-to-funding shows that other methods lead to dramatic biases. Therefore, this article advocates a paradigm shift in the modeling of time variables in entrepreneurship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the implications of the fair value protections contemplated by the standard corporate contract (i.e., the standard contract form for which corporate law provides) for the entrepreneur–venture capitalist relationship, focusing, in particular, on unavoidable value-destroying trade sales. First, it demonstrates that the typical entrepreneur–venture capitalist contract does institutionalize the venture capitalist's liquidity needs, allowing, under some circumstances, for counterintuitive instances of contractually-compliant value destruction. Unavoidable value-destroying trade sales are the most tangible example. Next, it argues that fair value protections can prevent the entrepreneur and venture capitalist from allocating the value that these transactions generate as they would want. Then, it shows that the reality of venture capital-backed firms calls for a process of adaptation of the standard corporate contract that has one major step in the deactivation or re-shaping of fair value protections. Finally, it argues that a standard corporate contract aiming to promote social welfare through venture capital should feature flexible fair value protections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Vulnerability curves (VCs) describe the loss of hydraulic conductance against increasing xylem tension, providing valuable insights about the response of plant water transport to water stress. Techniques to construct VCs have been developed and modified continuously, but controversies continue.We compared VCs constructed using the bench‐top dehydration (BD), air‐injection‐flow (AI), pneumatic‐air‐discharge (PAD), optical (OP) and X‐ray‐computed microtomography (MicroCT) methods for tropical trees and lianas with contrasting vessel lengths.The PAD method generated highly vulnerable VCs, the AI method intermediate VCs, whereas the BD, OP and MicroCT methods produced comparable and more resistant VCs. Vessel‐length and diameter accounted for the overestimation ratio of vulnerability estimated using the AI but not the PAD method. Compared with directly measured midday embolism levels, the PAD and AI methods substantially overestimated embolism, whereas the BD, MicroCT and OP methods provided more reasonable estimations.Cut‐open vessels, uncertainties in maximum air volume estimations, sample‐length effects, tissue cracks and shrinkage together may impede the reliability of the PAD method. In conclusion, we validate the BD, OP and MicroCT methods for tropical plants, whereas the PAD and AI need further mechanistic testing. Therefore, applications of VCs in estimating plant responses to drought need to be cautious. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The CMVM has published a set of guidelines that aim to harmonize and densify the parameters that must be considered in the context of the procedures for assessing suitability for exercising regulated functions and holding qualified shares in certain entities subject to the prudential supervision of the CMVM. The guidelines are divided into two sections, a section with an analysis and description of the parameters applicable to the suitability assessment, and a second section concerning the suitability assessment procedure and the intervention of the CMVM therein. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

El artículo discute las carteras de negocios y las oportunidades de crecimiento organizacional con un enfoque en las estrategias de expansión comercial de las empresas venezolanas de capital de riesgo electrónico, incluidos temas relacionados con el desarrollo de nuevos modelos comerciales. El artículo también analiza el pensamiento paradójico y la gestión de carteras de modelos de negocio de empresas.