Profiting from innovation and the intellectual property revolution

This paper reviews the contribution of Teece's article [Teece, D., 1986. Profiting from technological innovation: implications for integration, collaboration, licensing and public policy. Research Policy 15, 285-305.]. It then re-examines the core concept of appropriability in the light of recent developments in the business environment. Whereas twenty years ago the appropriability regime of an industry was exogenous and given, today they are often the product of conscious strategies of firms. And as open source software and other industries show, advantageous appropriability regimes are not always “tight” or characterized by strong intellectual property protections. The strategies adopted by firms that have successfully profited from their innovative activities cast into new light old questions about the impact of intellectual property protection on the rate and direction of innovation.     

Refillable and magnetically actuated drug delivery system using pear-shaped viscoelastic membrane

We report a refillable and valveless drug delivery device actuated by an external magnetic field for on-demand drug release to treat localized diseases. The device features a pear-shaped viscoelastic magnetic membrane inducing asymmetrical deflection and consecutive touchdown motion to the bottom of the dome-shaped drug reservoir in response to a magnetic field, thus achieving controlled discharge of the drug. Maximum drug release with 18 ± 1.5 μg per actuation was achieved under a 500 mT magnetic flux density, and various controlled drug doses were investigated with the combination of the number of accumulated actuations and the strength of the magnetic field.     

Adaptive unit-vector control of an uncertain heat diffusion process

This paper deals with the distributed tracking control of a heat process having uncertain diffusivity and subject to a distributed disturbance whose L₂ norm is bounded by a constant which is not known a priori. Under certain regularity assumptions on the disturbance and on the chosen reference profile, a distributed unit-vector control, with an adaptive magnitude, is designed which provides the asymptotic tracking of the reference. The logic governing the gain adaptation is gradient-based and monodirectional, i.e. the gain cannot decrease over time. Lyapunov arguments are invoked to support the convergence properties of the proposed scheme, whose performance are also investigated by means of computer simulations.