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This article examines the influence of culture and socioeconomic variables on national invention.

The purpose of this study is to empirically examine those factors that enhance the value of newly public firms. The article presents a model for the market value of a newly public biotechnology firm. Explanatory variables include several intangible indicators of the scientific capabilities of the firm including firm citations, licenses, patents, products in the pipeline, and R&D intensity. Top management team variables are also examined. The results support the conclusion that scientific capabilities significantly impact the value of the firm as viewed by public equity markets.

The purpose of this paper is to present insights into the way in which system change can be activated around the provision of services and support for people experiencing multiple disadvantages in an urban setting.

This paper is informed by a thematic analysis of reflections, reports, learning logs, interviews and experiences of those “activating” system change in the Golden Key partnership in Bristol between 2014 and 2021.

Four themes are identified, including “creating the conditions for change”, “framing your involvement”, “investing in relationships” and “reflective practice and learning”. For each of these, an illustrative vignette is provided.

Practical recommendations and reflective questions are provided with suggestions of further considerations for applying this approach in different contexts.

This paper describes an original approach of activating and supporting people to do system change to improve the lives of people facing multiple disadvantages.

This paper aims to describe an effort to provide for a robust and secure software development paradigm intended to support DevSecOps in a naval aviation enterprise (NAE) software support activity (SSA), with said paradigm supporting strong traceability and provability concerning the SSA’s output product, known as an operational flight program (OFP). Through a secure development environment (SDE), each critical software development function performed on said OFP during its development has a corresponding record represented on a blockchain.

An SDE is implemented as a virtual machine or container incorporating software development tools that are modified to support blockchain transactions. Each critical software development function, e.g. editing, compiling, linking, generates a blockchain transaction message with associated information embedded in the output of a said function that, together, can be used to prove integrity and support traceability. An attestation process is used to provide proof that the toolchain containing SDE is not subject to unauthorized modification at the time said critical function is performed.

Blockchain methods are shown to be a viable approach for supporting exhaustive traceability and strong provability of development system integrity for mission-critical software produced by an NAE SSA for NAE embedded systems software.

A blockchain-based authentication approach that could be implemented at the OFP point-of-load would provide for fine-grain authentication of all OFP software components, with each component or module having its own proof-of-integrity (including the integrity of the used development tools) over its entire development history.

Many SSAs have established control procedures for development such as check-out/check-in. This does not prove the SSA output software is secure. For one thing, a build system does not necessarily enforce procedures in a way that is determinable from the output. Furthermore, the SSA toolchain itself could be attacked. The approach described in this paper enforces security policy and embeds information into the output of every development function that can be cross-referenced to blockchain transaction records for provability and traceability that only trusted tools, free from unauthorized modifications, are used in software development. A key original concept of this approach is that it treats assigned developer time as a transferable digital currency.