Revolutions Take Time

The 2018 paper titled “Common Patterns in Revolutionary Infrastructures and Data” has been cited frequently, since we compared the current discussions about research data management with the developments of large infrastructures in the past believing, similar to philosophers such as Luciano Floridi, that the creation of an interoperable data domain will also be a revolutionary step. We identified the FAIR principles and the FAIR Digital Objects as nuclei for achieving the necessary convergence without which such new infrastructures will not take up. In this follow-up paper, we are elaborating on some factors that indicate that it will still take much time until breakthroughs will be achieved which is mainly devoted to sociological and political reasons. Therefore, it is important to describe visions such as FDO as self-standing entities, the easy plug-in concept, and the built-in security more explicitly to give a long-range perspective and convince policymakers and decision-makers. We also looked at major funding programs which all follow different approaches and do not define a converging core yet. This can be seen as an indication that these funding programs have huge potentials and increase awareness about data management aspects, but that we are far from converging agreements which we finally will need to create a globally integrated data space in the future. Finally, we discuss the roles of some major stakeholders who are all relevant in the process of agreement finding. Most of them are bound by short-term project cycles and funding constraints, not giving them sufficient space to work on long-term convergence concepts and take risks. The great opportunity to get funds for projects improving approaches and technology with the inherent danger of promising too much and the need for continuous reporting and producing visible results after comparably short periods is like a vicious cycle without a possibility to break out. We can recall that coming to the Internet with TCP/IP as a convergence standard was dependent on years of DARPA funding. Building large revolutionary infrastructures seems to be dependent on decision-makers that dare to think strategically and test out promising concepts at a larger scale.

Influence of Access To Finance On The Competitive Growth of SMEs in Lesotho.

Background: Access to finance is identified as one of the biggest problems faced by Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs) in most developing economies. Consequently, access to finance has been identified as a dominant constraint facing the SMEs sector in Lesotho. This paper established the factors of access to finance that influence the competitive growth of the SME sector in Lesotho. The factors addressed include financial information access, bank and business support services, the structure of banks and collateral requirements by the financial sector. Findings: The results from our analysis indicated that there is a relationship between independent variables of financial information access, Bank and business support service, the structure of banks and the collateral requirement by commercial banks and such influence SMEs capacity to attain competitive growth in Lesotho. In addition, the results indicated that Basotho entrepreneurs and managers see the predictors as critical factors of access to finance that constrained most enterprises access to needed credit from banks and such influence SMEs capacity to attain competitive growth in Lesotho. Conclusions: The study concludes that access to finance significantly affect the competitive growth of SMEs in Lesotho. Thus, this study suggests that several specific and harmonized financial policy actions are needed in the Lesotho financial market to identify enabling policy that ease enterprises access to adequate funding programs. These funding programs should target improved financial schemes that are coordinated, competitive and directed towards SMEs access to finance; harmonized credit policy which guarantees a win-win for SMEs loan applicants and the financial market operators.

Industry quantum computing applications

Quantum computing promises to overcome computational limitations with better and faster solutions for optimization, simulation, and machine learning problems. Europe and Germany are in the process of successfully establishing research and funding programs with the objective to advance the technology’s ecosystem and industrialization, thereby ensuring digital sovereignty, security, and competitiveness. Such an ecosystem comprises hardware/software solution providers, system integrators, and users from research institutions, start-ups, and industry. The vision of the Quantum Technology and Application Consortium (QUTAC) is to establish and advance the quantum computing ecosystem, supporting the ambitious goals of the German government and various research programs. QUTAC is comprised of ten members representing different industries, in particular automotive manufacturing, chemical and pharmaceutical production, insurance, and technology. In this paper, we survey the current state of quantum computing in these sectors as well as the aerospace industry and identify the contributions of QUTAC to the ecosystem. We propose an application-centric approach for the industrialization of the technology based on proven business impact. This paper identifies 24 different use cases. By formalizing high-value use cases into well-described reference problems and benchmarks, we will guide technological progress and eventually commercialization. Our results will be beneficial to all ecosystem participants, including suppliers, system integrators, software developers, users, policymakers, funding program managers, and investors.

Health Programs as Social Programs: Navigating Difficult Healthcare Policy Decisions

Apart from public health and preventive medicine campaigns, a health authority funds healthcare programs primarily for the purpose of immediately improving clinical patient out­ comes. For individual health treatments, funding decisions by Canadian provincial govern­ ments incorporate some equivalent of a cost­benefit calculation,such as the cost­effectiveness analysis (CEA). This research is important to health policy makers because it considers the effects of expanding a CEA to analyze societal impacts that are already of importance to the government when the appropriateness or accuracy of the cost­benefit calculation is unclear. I use the example of in vitro fertilization funding programs to demonstrate the argument that health programs may also address other relevant issues related to the social determinants of health.

Biodiversity policies, opportunities for restoring the economy

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the strategic and legal framework of the various areas directly dependent on the protection of biodiversity and the ecosystem approach in the funding programmes related to them. Data were collected by consulting a variety of sources, including articles, project results, European and national legislation, strategies and funding programs in the fields of Water, Forestry, Biodiversity, Climate Change, Fisheries and Aquaculture, Agriculture and Rural Development, Energy and Regional Development. The results showed that, in the areas analyzed, there are no efficient tools for the integration of ecosystem services and natural capital. The level of integration of the ecosystem approach in the analyzed areas compared to the state of ecosystems in Romania indicates that there are not enough measures to protect natural capital through sustainable management. Both inter-institutional integration and coordination are needed to streamline the management of natural capital and the correct analysis and implementation of a payment system for ecosystem services.

Grand challenges and emergent modes of convergence science

To address complex problems, scholars are increasingly faced with challenges of integrating diverse domains. We analyzed the evolution of this convergence paradigm in the ecosystem of brain science, a research frontier that provides a contemporary testbed for evaluating two modes of cross-domain integration: (a) cross-disciplinary collaboration among experts from academic departments associated with disparate disciplines; and (b) cross-topic knowledge recombination across distinct subject areas. We show that research involving both modes features a 16% citation premium relative to a mono-domain baseline. We further show that the cross-disciplinary mode is essential for integrating across large epistemic distances. Yet we find research utilizing cross-topic exploration alone—a convergence shortcut—to be growing in prevalence at roughly 3% per year, significantly outpacing the more essential cross-disciplinary convergence mode. By measuring shifts in the prevalence and impact of different convergence modes in the 5-year intervals up to and after 2013, we find that shortcut patterns may relate to competitive pressures associated with Human Brain funding initiatives launched that year. Without policy adjustments, flagship funding programs may unintentionally incentivize suboptimal integration patterns, thereby undercutting convergence science’s potential in tackling grand challenges.

Prioritizing School Finance Equity during an Economic Downturn: Recommendations for State Policy Makers

State budgets temporarily crashed amid the COVID-19 pandemic and economic shutdown, placing education funding at risk. To demonstrate implications for school finance, we show that (1) school districts are racially segregated along class lines; (2) higher-poverty districts receive a greater share of funds from state, as opposed to local sources, making them especially vulnerable during economic downturns; and (3) many states made across-the-board K-12 budget reductions following the Great Recession, but those cuts disproportionately impacted high-poverty districts. A decade later, state legislators may face similar fiscal challenges. Instead of enacting acrossthe-board cuts, states can identify specific funding programs that already benefit lower-poverty districts or wealthier students. We demonstrate how this approach would work under different state finance models and offer recommendations for state policy makers.

Conceptualizing and Measuring the Promotion of Nonprofit Organizations’ Evidence Use by U.S. Social Service Funding Programs

Previous research on U.S. federal promotion of evidence-based programming has focused on evidence-based program registries and concludes their usefulness is undermined by prioritizing internal validity over external validity. This research explores how federal funding programs are actually promoting funded nonprofit organizations’ evidence use instead of what we might infer from registries alone. An inductively developed conceptual framework is applied to describe all 53 fiscal year (FY) 2019 social service funding programs that include nonprofit organizations among the eligible applicants, finding they promote multiple types of evidence use, with generally low coerciveness, and with applicants frequently co-determining what counts as evidence. These findings point to promotion of evidence use that balances evidence-driven prescriptiveness and enabling nonprofits’ innovation.

SMEs’s potentials of Research and Development and the European Union Prospective. A Literature Review

SME-s role in the economic development and economic structure is changing drastically, as it is gaining new dimensions the role they have as social agents. This becomes particularly present in the paradigm shift of the EU funding schema and priorities, for member and candidate states, indicating that from catalysts of development they are now considered as important and active agents of Innovation by their R&D potential. The article provides a comprehensive literature review on different aspects of R&D processes in SMEs under the support of the funding programs of European Union collected from the reputed publications. The purpose is to provide an outline on the structure and dynamics of R&D in SMEs to highlight its role in the performance of these businesses in particular and in national and regional economies at the macro level. This paper aims to contribute to current discussions within the field of innovation by further exploring how EU R&D funding policies work in practice.