Developing enterprise curriculum: Building on rock, not sand

Entrepreneurial education is the process of providing individuals with the ability to recognise commercial opportunities and the insight, self-esteem, knowledge and skills to act on them. It includes instruction in opportunity recognition, commercialising a concept, marshalling resources in the face of risk, and initiating a business venture. It also includes instruction in traditional business disciplines such as management, marketing, information systems and finance. The purpose of this paper is to describe the design and introduction of a new program in Entrepreneurship at the University of Tasmania. Rather than adopt a traditional business school (passive learning) approach, within this program the method and responsibility of learning has largely been reversed through the process of student centred learning. This method of learning represents a challenging departure from the traditional mainstream teaching practices. In considering the benefits achievable from this teaching method, this paper also considers the difficulties in transferring increased responsibility to students to manage their futures.

A contemporary approach to entrepreneurship education

Entrepreneurial education is the process of providing individuals with the ability to recognise commercial opportunities and the insight, self-esteem, knowledge and skills to act on them. It includes instruction in opportunity recognition, commercialising a concept, marshalling resources in the face of risk, and initiating a business venture. It also includes instruction in traditional business disciplines such as management, marketing, information systems and finance. The purpose of this paper is to describe the design and introduction of a new program in Entrepreneurship at the University of Tasmania. Within this program the process and responsibility of learning has largely been reversed through the process of student centred learning. This method of learning represents a challenging departure from the traditional mainstream teaching practices. In considering the benefits achievable from this teaching method, this paper also considers the difficulties in transferring increased responsibility to students to manage their futures.

Graduate entrepreneurship: More than child's play

Purpose With the unbridled demand for entrepreneurship in higher education, the purpose of this paper is to identify how pedagogy can inhibit students in making the transition to graduate entrepreneurship. Along the way, the concept of what and who is a graduate entrepreneur is challenged. Design/methodology/approach The paper reports upon the pragmatic development of enterprise programmes in Ireland and Australia. Despite different starting points, a convergence of purpose as to what can be realistically expected of enterprise education has emerged. Findings This study reinforces the shift away from commercialisation strategies associated with entrepreneurial action towards developing essential life skills as core to any university programme and key to developing entrepreneurial capacity among students. Despite similar government intervention, university policy and student demand for practical-based entrepreneurial learning in both cases, graduates tend not to engage in immediate entrepreneurial action due to the lack of fit between their programme of study and individual resource profiles, suggesting that graduate entrepreneurship is more than child's play. Practical implications There are practical implications for educationalists forced to consider the effectiveness of their enterprise teachings, and cautionary evidence for those charged with providing support services for graduates. Originality/value Given the evolutionary approaches used at the University of Tasmania to develop students as "reasonable adventurers" and at the University of Ulster to develop "the enterprising mindset" the paper presents evidence of the need to allow students the opportunity to apply entrepreneurial learning to their individual life experiences in order to reasonably venture into entrepreneurial activity.

Entrepreneurs: The new global adventurers

The chapter provides guidance on how to develop an entrepreneurial mindset, begin a successful venture, and change the world for the better.

Regional resilience: Pre-service teacher preparation to teach in the bush

This paper reports on the outcomes of a two year ALTC Competitive Research and Development Project that aimed to "Develop Strategies at the Pre-Service Level to Address Critical Teacher Attraction and Retention Issues in Australian Rural, Regional and Remote Schools". As well as developing a ‘training framework’ and teaching guides to increase the capacity and credibility of four universities to prepare educators who might venture out of the metropolitan area to teach, data were gathered from pre-service and graduate teachers to analyse regional resilience. It was found that there was a strong likelihood to participate in a regional practicum and stay in a non-metropolitan community once they graduated from university if they had a positive attitude to regional Western Australia either through a family connection or previous experience. Recommendations from this study emphasise the importance of having pre-service students participate in positive regional experiences early in their university study.

Achieving medium-high density in low scale development: The Queensland experience in innovative ‘fine-grained’ urbanism

Worldwide population growth and economic agglomeration is driving increasing urban density within larger metropolitan conurbations. Population growth and housing diversity and affordability issues in Queensland have seen an increasing demand for more diverse and higher density development. Under Queensland’s flexible planning regulatory provisions, a level of ‘medium’ to ‘high density’ is being achieved by a focus on fine-grained urban design, low scale development, lot diversity, and delivery of single dwelling products. This for Queensland (and Australia) has been an unprecedented innovation in urban and dwelling design. Dwellings are being delivered on lots with zero regulatory minimum sizes providing for a range of new products including ‘apartments on the ground’. This paper reviews recent and nascent demonstrations of EDQ’s fine-grained urbanism principles, identifiable with historical ‘vernacular suburbanism’. The paper introduces and defines a concept of a ‘natural density’ linking human scale built form with walkability. The paper challenges the notion that (sub)urban development, outside major city centres, needs to be of a higher scale to achieve density and diversity aspirations. ‘Natural density’ provides a means of achieving the increasing demand for more diverse and higher density development.

The Situated Cases

In this chapter, we meet the eight children whose documented lives are the heart of this book. The children are spread across 6 continents, so we have some textual traveling to do. We find each child in a local school. There they venture into literacy along official paths negotiated with their teachers and, also, along unofficial paths tied to their desire for peer companionship and social belonging (Corsaro, 2011; Nelson, 2007). We are most interested in their literate productions—their composing, be it with stick and dirt, pencil, crayons, and paper, tablet computer, or chalk and slate. Each child is a unique story, and each story is told by an author with particular interests in the goings-on in school, that is, with a particular angle of vision. All the authors, though, take us into a child’s educational circumstance; they give us a sense of the school’s physical site and its official curricular guidelines. Most importantly, they collectively allow us a global view of children as symbol users and social participants in the official and the unofficial worlds of school. No matter where young children go to school, they are expected to learn to “write” (although writing, as the cases illustrate, does not always mean “composing”)...

Rate of ribonucleic acid chain growth in Mycobacterium tuberculosis H37Rv.

Two methods were employed to measure the rate of ribonucleic acid (RNA) chain growth in vivo in Mycobacterium tuberculosis H37Rv cultures growing in Sauton medium at 37 degrees C, with a generation time of 10 h. In the first, the bacteria were allowed to assimilate [3H]uracil or [3H]guanine into their RNA for short time periods. The RNA was then extracted and hydrolyzed with alkali, and the radioactivity in the resulting nucleotides and nucleosides was measured. The data obtained by this method allowed the calculation of the individual nucleotide step times during the growth of RNA chains, from which the average rate of RNA chain elongation was estimated to be about 4 nucleotides per s. The second method employed the antibiotic rifampin, which specifically inhibits the initiation of RNA synthesis without interfering with the elongation and completion of nascent RNA chains. Usint this method, the transcription time of the 16S, 23S, and 5S ribosomal RNA genes was estimated to be 7.6 min, which corresponds to a ribosomal RNA chain growth rate of 10 nucleotides per s.

Molecular dynamics simulation of the phosphorylation-induced conformational changes of a tau peptide fragment

Aggregation of the microtubule associated protein tau (MAPT) within neurons of the brain is the leading cause of tauopathies such as Alzheimer's disease. MAPT is a phospho-protein that is selectively phosphorylated by a number of kinases in vivo to perform its biological function. However, it may become pathogenically hyperphosphorylated, causing aggregation into paired helical filaments and neurofibrillary tangles. The phosphorylation induced conformational change on a peptide of MAPT (htau225−250) was investigated by performing molecular dynamics simulations with different phosphorylation patterns of the peptide (pThr231 and/or pSer235) in different simulation conditions to determine the effect of ionic strength and phosphate charge. All phosphorylation patterns were found to disrupt a nascent terminal β-sheet pattern (226VAVVR230 and 244QTAPVP249), replacing it with a range of structures. The double pThr231/pSer235 phosphorylation pattern at experimental ionic strength resulted in the best agreement with NMR structural characterization, with the observation of a transient α-helix (239AKSRLQT245). PPII helical conformations were only found sporadically throughout the simulations. Proteins 2014; 82:1907–1923. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Isolation and visualization of active presynaptic filaments of recA protein and single-stranded DNA

In the presence of ATP, recA protein forms a presynaptic complex with single-stranded DNA that is an obligatory intermediate in homologous pairing. Presynaptic complexes of recA protein and circular single strands that are active in forming joint molecules can be isolated by gel filtration. These isolated active complexes are nucleoprotein filaments with the following characteristics: (i) a contour length that is at least 1.5 times that of the corresponding duplex DNA molecule, (ii) an ordered structure visualized by negative staining as a striated filament with a repeat distance of 9.0 nm and a width of 9.3 nm, (iii) approximately 8 molecules of recA protein and 20 nucleotide residues per striation. The widened spacing between bases in the nucleoprotein filament means that the initial matching of complementary sequences must involve intertwining of the filament and duplex DNA, unwinding of the latter, or some combination of both to equalize the spacing between nascent base pairs. These experiments support the concept that recA protein first forms a filament with single-stranded DNA, which in turn binds to duplex DNA to mediate both homologous pairing and subsequent strand exchange.

Workers are doing it for themselves? Local labor solidarity in precarious times

Historically, organized labor has played a fundamental role in guaranteeing basic rights and privileges for screen media workers and defending union and guild members (however unevenly) from egregious abuses of power. Yet, despite the recent turn to labor in media and cultural studies, organized labor today has received only scant attention, even less so in locations outside Hollywood. This presentation thus intervenes in two significant ways: first, it acknowledges the ongoing global ‘undoing’ of organized labor as a consequence of footloose production and conglomeration within the screen industries, and second, it examines a case example of worker solidarity and political praxis taking shape outside formal labor institutions in response to those structural shifts. Accordingly, it links an empirical study of individual agency to broader debates associated with the spatial dynamics of screen media production, including local capacity, regional competition, and precariousness. Drawing from ethnographic interviews with local film and television workers in Glasgow, Scotland, I consider the political alliance among three nascent labor organizations in the city: one for below-the-line crew, one for facility operators, and (oddly enough) one for producers. Collectively, the groups share a desire to transform Glasgow into a global production hub, following the infrastructure developments in nearby cities like Belfast, Prague, and Budapest. They furthermore frame their objectives in political terms: establishing global scale is considered a necessary maneuver to improve local working conditions like workplace safety, income disparity, skills training, and job access. Ultimately, I argue these groups are a product of an inadequate union structure and outdated policy vision for the screen sector , once-supportive institutions currently out of sync with the global realities of media production. Furthermore, the groups’ advocacy efforts reveal the extent to which workers themselves (in additional to capital) can seek “spatial fixes” to suture their prospects to specific political and economic goals. Of course, such activities manifest under conditions outside of the workers’ control but nevertheless point to an important tension within capitalist social relations, namely that the agency to reshape the spatial relationships in their own lives recasts the geography of labor in terms that aren’t inherent or exclusive to the interests of global capital.

Unraveling the “passion orchestra” in academia

This paper disentangles how organization members' “passion orchestra” is related to their entrepreneurial intentions in the particularly relevant context of academia. Drawing on passion literature and identity theory, we propose and test a model linking two central parts of researchers' “passion orchestra”, namely entrepreneurial and obsessive scientific passion, directly and indirectly, to spin-off and start-up intentions. While spin-off intentions refer to intentions to found a firm based upon research results, start-up intentions denote intentions to start any type of company. Using a sample of 2308 researchers from 24 European universities, our findings reveal that higher levels of entrepreneurial passion are associated with both stronger spin-off and start-up intentions. Further, obsessive scientific passion is positively associated with researchers' intentions to create a spin-off, and negatively with their propensity to establish a start-up. Entrepreneurial self-efficacy and affective organizational commitment mediate these effects. Finally, the two types of passion show characteristic interactions. Obsessive scientific passion moderates the entrepreneurial passion–intentions relationship such that it strengthens spin-off intentions. Our results highlight that recasting the individual driven by a singular passion to one with a “passion orchestra” provides a more holistic understanding of the new venture creation process. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

Diversity of DNA methyltransferases that recognize asymmetric target sequences

DNA methyltransferases (MTases) are a group of enzymes that catalyze the methyl group transfer from S-adenosyl-L-methionine in a sequence-specific manner. Orthodox Type II DNA MTases usually recognize palindromic DNA sequences and add a methyl group to the target base (either adenine or cytosine) on both strands. However, there are a number of MTases that recognize asymmetric target sequences and differ in their subunit organization. In a bacterial cell, after each round of replication, the substrate for any MTase is hemimethylated DNA, and it therefore needs only a single methylation event to restore the fully methylated state. This is in consistent with the fact that most of the DNA MTases studied exist as monomers in solution. Multiple lines of evidence suggest that some DNA MTases function as dimers. Further, functional analysis of many restriction-modification systems showed the presence of more than one or fused MTase genes. It was proposed that presence of two MTases responsible for the recognition and methylation of asymmetric sequences would protect the nascent strands generated during DNA replication from cognate restriction endonuclease. In this review, MTases recognizing asymmetric sequences have been grouped into different subgroups based on their unique properties. Detailed characterization of these unusual MTases would help in better understanding of their specific biological roles and mechanisms of action. The rapid progress made by the genome sequencing of bacteria and archaea may accelerate the identification and study of species- and strain-specific MTases of host-adapted bacteria and their roles in pathogenic mechanisms.

From Creative Ideas to New Emerging Ventures: Entrepreneurial Processes among Finnish Design Entrepreneurs

This study focuses on self-employed industrial designers and how they emerge new venture ideas. More specifically, this study strives to determine what design entrepreneurs do when they create new venture ideas, how venture ideas are nurtured into being, and how the processes are organized to bring such ideas to the market in the given industrial context. In contemporary times when the concern for the creative class is peaking, the research and business communities need more insight of the kind that this study provides, namely how professionals may contribute to their entrepreneurial processes and other agents’ business processes. On the one hand, the interviews underlying this study suggest that design entrepreneurs may act as reactive service providers who are appointed by producers or marketing parties to generate product-related ideas on their behalf. On the other hand, the interviews suggest that proactive behaviour that aims on generating own venture ideas, may force design entrepreneurs to take considerable responsibility in organizing their entrepreneurial processes. Another option is that they strive to bring venture ideas to the market in collaboration, or by passing these to other agents’ product development processes. Design entrepreneurs’ venture ideas typically emerge from design related starting points and observations. Product developers are mainly engaged with creating their own ideas, whereas service providers refer mainly to the development of other agents’ venture ideas. In contrast with design entrepreneurs, external actors commonly emphasize customer demand as their primary source for new venture ideas, as well as development of these in close interaction with available means of production and marketing. Consequently, design entrepreneurs need to address market demand since without sales their venture ideas may as well be classified as art. In case, they want to experiment with creative ideas, then there should be another source of income to support this typically uncertain and extensive process. Currently, it appears like a lot of good venture ideas and resources are being wasted, when venture ideas do not suite available production or business procedures. Sufficient communication between design entrepreneurs and other agents would assist all parties in developing production efficient and distributable venture ideas. Overall, the findings suggest that design entrepreneurs are often involved simultaneously in several processes that aim at emerging new product related ventures. Consequently, design entrepreneurship is conceptualized in this study as a dual process. This implies that design entrepreneurs can simultaneously be in charge of their entrepreneurial processes, as they operate as resources in other agents’ business processes. The interconnection between activities and agents suggests that these kinds of processes tend to be both complex and multifaceted to their nature.

Angel Investing in Finland: An Analysis Based on Agency Theory and the Incomplete Contracting Theory

Wealthy individuals - business angels who invest a share of their net worth in entrepreneurial ventures - form an essential part of an informal venture capital market that can secure funding for entrepreneurial ventures. In Finland, business angels represent an untapped pool of capital that can contribute to fostering entrepreneurial development. In addition, business angels can bridge knowledge gaps in new business ventures by means of making their human capital available. This study has two objectives. The first is to gain an understanding of the characteristics and investment behaviour of Finnish business angels. The strongest focus here is on the due diligence procedures and their involvement post investment. The second objective is to assess whether agency theory and the incomplete contacting theory are useful theoretical lenses in the arena of business angels. To achieve the second objective, this study investigates i) how risk is mitigated in the investment process, ii) how uncertainty influences the comprehensiveness of due diligence as well as iii) how control is allocated post investment. Research hypotheses are derived from assumptions underlying agency theory and the incomplete contacting theory. The data for this study comprise interviews with 53 business angels. In terms of sample size this is the largest on Finnish business angels. The research hypotheses in this study are tested using regression analysis. This study suggests that the Finnish informal venture capital market appears to be comprised of a limited number of business angels whose style of investing much resembles their formal counterparts’. Much focus is placed on managing risks prior to making the investment by strong selectiveness and by a relatively comprehensive due diligence. The involvement is rarely on a day-to-day basis and many business angels seem to see board membership as a more suitable alternative than involvement in the operations of an entrepreneurial venture. The uncertainty involved does not seem to drive an increase in due diligence. On the contrary, it would appear that due diligence is more rigorous in safer later stage investments and when the business angels have considerable previous experience as investors. Finnish business angels’ involvement post investment is best explained by their degree of ownership in the entrepreneurial venture. It seems that when investors feel they are sufficiently rewarded, in terms of an adequate equity stake, they are willing to involve themselves actively in their investments. The lack of support for a relationship between increased uncertainty and the comprehensiveness of due diligence may partly be explained by an increasing trend towards portfolio diversification. This is triggered by a taxation system that favours investments through investment companies rather than direct investments. Many business angels appear to have substituted a specialization strategy that builds on reducing uncertainty for a diversification strategy that builds on reducing firm specific (idiosyncratic) risk by holding shares in ventures whose returns are not expected to exhibit a strong positive correlation.