HighlightA brown planthopper resistance recessive gene, BPH29, was cloned which contained a B3 DNA-binding domain and conferred resistance by a mechanism that was similar to plant defence against pathogens.

Open innovation has generally been seen as an important driver of improved efficiency and effectiveness in product and/or service innovation. This chapter extends these focal areas to include process innovations -generally organizational innovations aimed at improving the nature of organizational value adding and factor transformative systems. In this study we assess the impact of openness on products, services and processes, drawing on a large-scale sample of Australian firms. We find that open innovation models are useful for firms seeking to innovate in processes, as well as products and services. However, we find that openness to external information sources may, after a time, lead to decreasing marginal returns as measured by innovation performance. We also observe that, within our sample, the proposed complementarities between internal and external knowledge sources are generally only evident as precursors to the introduction of new products and services, and may not be as beneficial in stimulating process innovations. We also show that investment in absorptive capacity has a declining marginal effect on the innovation performance of new processes, but not on the introduction of new products and services.

No abstract

The brown planthopper (Nilaparvata lugens Stål; BPH) is one of the most serious rice pests worldwide. Growing resistant varieties is the most effective way to manage this insect, and wild rice species are a valuable source of resistance genes for developing resistant cultivars. BPH27 derived from an accession of Guangxi wild rice, Oryza rufipogon Griff. (Accession no. 2183, hereafter named GX2183), was primarily mapped to a 17-cM region on the long arm of the chromosome four. In this study, fine mapping of BPH27 was conducted using two BC(1)F(2) populations derived from introgression lines of GX2183. Insect resistance was evaluated in the BC(1)F(2) populations with 6,010 individual offsprings, and 346 resistance extremes were obtained and employed for fine mapping of BPH27. High-resolution linkage analysis defined the BPH27 locus to an 86.3-kb region in Nipponbare. Regarding the sequence information of rice cultivars, Nipponbare and 93-11, all predicted open reading frames (ORFs) in the fine-mapping region have been annotated as 11 types of proteins, and three ORFs encode disease-related proteins. Moreover, the average BPH numbers showed significant differences in 96-120 h after release in comparisons between the preliminary near-isogenic lines (pre-NILs, lines harboring resistance genes) and BaiR54. BPH growth and development were inhibited and survival rates were lower in the pre-NIL plants compared with the recurrent parent BaiR54. The pre-NIL exhibited 50.7% reductions in population growth rates (PGR) compared to BaiR54. The new development in fine mapping of BPH27 will facilitate the efforts to clone this important resistant gene and to use it in BPH-resistance rice breeding.

No abstract

The performance of polymer light-emitting diodes (LEDs) having the configuration Al/MEH–PPV/ITO, where MEH–PPV=poly(2-methoxy-5-(2′-ethyl-hexyloxy)-1,4-phenylene-vinylene) has been improved by light iodine doping of the emissive MEH–PPV polymer layer whereby the turn-on voltage is reduced and the external quantum efficiency is increased by an order of magnitude. It differs from nondoped MEH–PPV LEDs in that light emission is observed in both forward and reverse bias modes. It is believed that the mobility of the I3− anions in the (MEH–PPV)x+y(I3)xy− species formed on doping the MEH–PPV compensate for injected charges at the electrodes, thus reducing the electron and hole injection barriers.

While 'open innovation' is often considered to be an organisational strategy with universal application, the generalisability of this set of arrangements to organisations operating within emerging economies has yet to be fully explored. This study provides empirical evidence of its importance within a substantial sample of Chinese large firms and SMEs. Using Tobit regression analysis, our findings indicate that external knowledge sources from inter-firm networking are more important in creating the benefits of open innovation for Chinese SMEs than their larger peers. Linkages to university and research institutes generally have few direct effects on the innovation performance of both large and small firms in China. However, the role of universities and research institutes is shown to be important among our large firm sample when combined with evident internal absorptive capacity. This interaction is generally limited to our large firm sample, and is not as evident among small firms. Our study indicates that the barriers to the adoption of open innovation by Chinese firms might be largely related to the comparatively weak domestic research expertise and limited organisational absorptive capabilities, with this most particularly evident for SMEs.These findings suggest that, based on this evidence, there is no need for emerging economies like China to mimic the emergence path from closed to open innovation followed by developed countries. Chinese firms will be more likely to garner the benefits available from openness when they develop the capabilities required to identify, assimilate and commercialise knowledge and technologies obtained from external sources.

Economic openness, both in terms of increased international trade exposure and enhanced inter-firm networking, has been a key element of China's economic emergence since the implementation of market reforms and the ''opening-up policy'' over 30 years ago. Unfortunately, these changes have also coincided with the increased incidence of bribery and corruption. Both in general, and in the specific context of China, research on the relationship between a firm's tendency toward openness and its propensity to engage in bribery is scarce. This study seeks to fill this gap based on empirical evidence provided by a large sample of Chinese firms. The findings of the study reveal that firms' increased networking and openness tend to occur contemporaneously with greater bribery and corruption. We suggest that this may be due to the misuse of guanxi-based networks that coincide with the presence of firms' open network strategies, heightened by the potential loss of resource and capability heterogeneity (and hence reduced competitive advantages) in the context of openness. We further find that firms paying bribes do so as an attempt to overcome unnecessary bureaucratic processes and ineffective institutional support that might tend to hinder their development.