Qi Zou

Recognizing the importance of involving suppliers in the new product development (NPD) process, extensive studies have examined this issue at a buyer–supplier dyadic level. However, how supplier involvement leads to better NPD performance is not clearly explained. Additionally, extending the dyadic relationships to triadic relationships and addressing how to manage the two competing suppliers with fair conduct remains unexplored. To answer these questions, this study developed a conceptual model theorizing the role of supplier involvement, information sharing, and justice in the NPD process within a buyer–supplier–supplier triadic relationship. Based on survey data collected from 200 U.S. firms, Structural Equation Modeling is used to test the hypothesis. The results first confirmed the criticality of involving both primary and secondary suppliers during NPD. Second, the positive effect of triadic supplier involvement on innovation performance is fully mediated by information sharing. Finally, this study explored the different roles of procedural justice and distributive justice; the results confirmed that procedural justice acts as a moderator for the relationship between triadic supplier involvement and information sharing, whereas distributive justice moderates the effect between information sharing and innovation performance. Our findings contribute to the literature of triadic supplier involvement-new product development and relationship management. Accordingly, these findings highlight key implications for managers and policymakers.

Knowledge of three-dimensional structures of each individual particles of asymmetric and flexible proteins is essential in understanding those proteins' functions; but their structures are difficult to determine. Electron tomography provides a tool for imaging a single and unique biological object from a series of tilted angles, but it is challenging to image a single protein for three-dimensional reconstruction due to the imperfect mechanical control capability of the specimen goniometer under both a medium to high magnification and an optimized beam coherence condition. Here, we report a fully mechanical control method for automating ET data acquisition without using beam tilt/shift processes. This method could reduce the accumulation of beam tilt/shift that used to compensate the error from the mechanical control, but downgraded the beam coherence. Our method was developed by minimizing the error of the target object center during the tilting process through a closed-loop proportional-integral control algorithm. The validations by both negative staining and cryo-electron microscopy suggest that this method has a comparable capability to other ET methods in tracking target proteins while maintaining optimized beam coherence conditions for imaging.

Our age has often been called "an age of technology." However, somewhat ironically, our philosophy, as the crystallization of the spirit of any age, has done little to study the issues of technology, and its understanding of technology itself is very superficial. The reason is not that there are no philosophical questions worth investigating in technology, or that the technological mode of thought is not worth reflecting upon from the angle of philosophy. Rather, as some Western philosophers have pointed out, the fundamental reason for philosophy's neglect of technology lies in that people have "mistakenly assumed that technology is too far removed from the elegant realm of thought and ideology" ([1], p. 219).