Examining Relationships between Culture, Creativity and Business Stage in an Emerging Market: A Categorical Data Analysis of Vietnam’s Data Set

In this article, we offer a new way of exploring relationships between three different dimensions of a business operation, namely the stage of business development, the methods of creativity and the major cultural values. Although separately, each of these has gained enormous attention from the management research community, evidenced by a large volume of research studies, there have been not many studies that attempt to describe the logic that connect these three important aspects of a business; let alone empirical evidences that support any significant relationships among these variables. The paper also provides a data set and an empirical investigation on that data set, using a categorical data analysis, to conclude that examinations of these possible relationships are meaningful and possible for seemingly unquantifiable information. The results also show that the most significant category among all creativity methods employed in Vietnamese enterprises is the “creative disciplines” rule in the “entrepreneurial phase,” while in general creative disciplines have played a critical role in explaining the structure of our data sample, for both stages of development in our consideration.

Impact of various endocrine and paracrine factors on in vitro culture of preantral follicles in rodents

Folliculogenesis is a complex process regulated by various paracrine and autocrine factors. In vitro growth systems of primordial and preantral follicles have been developed for future use of immature oocytes, as sources of fertilizable oocytes and for studying follicular growth and oocyte maturation mechanisms. Rodents were often chosen for in vitro follicular culture research and a lot of factors implicated in folliculogenesis have been identified using this model. To date, the mouse is the only species in which the whole process of follicular growth, oocyte maturation, fertilization and embryo transfer into recipient females was successfully performed. However, the efficiency of in vitro culture systems must still be considerably improved. Within the follicle, numerous events affect cell proliferation and the acquisition of oocyte developmental competency in vitro, including interactions between the follicular cells and the oocyte, and the composition of the culture medium. Effects of the acting factors depend on the stage of follicle development, the culture system used and the species. This paper reviews the action of endocrine, paracrine factors and other components of culture medium on in vitro growth of preantral follicles in rodents.