Open Access

What drives entrepreneurial action to create a lasting impact? The creation of new ventures that aim at having an impact beyond their financial performance face additional challenges: achieving economic sustainability and at the same time addressing social or environmental issues. Little is known on how these new hybrid organizations, aiming for multiple impact dimensions, manage to be congruent with their blended values. A dataset of 4,125 early-stage ventures is used to gain insights into how blended values are converted into financial, social and environmental impacts, giving shape to different types of hybrid organizations. Our findings suggest new hybrid organizations might opt to sacrifice financial impact to achieve social impact, yet this is not the case when they aim to generate environmental or sustainable impact. Therefore, the tensions and sacrifices related to holding blended values are not homogeneous across all types of new hybrid organizations.

In today's volatile world, established companies must be capable of optimizing their core business with incremental innovations while simultaneously developing discontinuous innovations to maintain their long-term competitiveness. Balancing both is a major challenge for companies, since different types of innovation require different organizational structures, operational modes and management styles. Established companies tend to excel in improving their current business through incremental innovations which are closely related to their current knowledge base and competencies. However, this often goes hand in hand with challenges in the exploration of knowledge that is new to the company and that is essential for the development of discontinuous innovations. In this respect, the concept of corporate entrepreneurship is recognized as a way to strengthen the exploration of new knowledge and to support the development of discontinuous innovation. For managing corporate entrepreneurship more effectively, it is crucial to understand which types of knowledge can be created through corporate entrepreneurship and which organizational designs are more suited to gain certain types of knowledge. To answer these questions, this study analyzed 23 semi-structured interviews conducted with established companies that are running such entrepreneurial activities. The results show (1) that three general types of knowledge can be explored through corporate entrepreneurship and (2) that some organizational designs are more suited to explore certain knowledge types than others are.

We provide an overview of the ongoing discussions on the objectives of the energy transition in the form of a conceptual framework, intending to facilitate the search for the most viable options for a successful transformation of the energy system. For this purpose, we examine the development of energy policy goals in Germany in the past and present, whereby we give an overview of objectives and assessment approaches from politics, economics, and science. Moreover, we then merge the different views into a common framework and analyze the central conflict between the wholeness of a hypothetical target circle and the simplification in favor of a hypothetical target point in more detail.

Low latency communication requires soft-input decoding of binary block codes with small to medium block lengths. In this work, we consider generalized multiple concatenated (GMC) codes based on the Plotkin construction. These codes are similar to Reed-Muller (RM) codes. In contrast to RM codes, BCH codes are employed as component codes. This leads to improved code parameters. Moreover, a decoding algorithm is proposed that exploits the recursive structure of the concatenation. This algorithm enables efficient soft-input decoding of binary block codes with small to medium lengths. The proposed codes and their decoding achieve significant performance gains compared with RM codes and recursive GMC decoding.

Asymmetric cryptography empowers secure key exchange and digital signatures for message authentication. Nevertheless, consumer electronics and embedded systems often rely on symmetric cryptosystems because asymmetric cryptosystems are computationally intensive. Besides, implementations of cryptosystems are prone to side-channel attacks (SCA). Consequently, the secure and efficient implementation of asymmetric cryptography on resource-constrained systems is demanding. In this work, elliptic curve cryptography is considered. A new concept for an SCA resistant calculation of the elliptic curve point multiplication over Eisenstein integers is presented and an efficient arithmetic over Eisenstein integers is proposed. Representing the key by Eisenstein integer expansions is beneficial to reduce the computational complexity and the memory requirements of an SCA protected implementation.