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While it is widely known that founder Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) can influence firm innovation, few studies have comprehensively examined how the founder CEO affects the firm’s innovation input, innovation output, and input-to-output conversion rate, and how these effects depend on the founder CEO’s demographic, cognitive, and corporate positional characteristics. We analyze the nine-year panel data of China’s Growth Enterprise Market (GEM)-listed companies to empirically study the relationship between founder CEO (vs. non-founder CEO), CEO characteristics, and firm innovation efficiency. Our analysis produces four major findings. First, founder CEO firms have a lower innovation input and higher innovation output than non-founder CEO firms. Second, compared with male founder CEOs, female founder CEOs can further reduce innovation input without sacrificing innovation output. Third, founder CEOs with a higher education level can also further reduce innovation input without sacrificing innovation output. Finally, compared with founder CEOs that are not the chairman of the board, the founder CEOs that take dual positions (CEO and chairman) allocate higher innovation input, but the innovation output does not increase. These findings have implications for both research and practice in helping firms achieve sustainable development.

BACKGROUNDAlginate lyases are important tools for alginate biodegradation and oligosaccharide production, which have great potential in food and biofuel fields. The alginate polysaccharide utilization loci (PUL) typically encode a series of alginate lyases with the synergistic action pattern. Exploring valuable alginate lyases and revealing the synergistic effect of enzymes in the PUL is of great significance.RESULTSAn alginate PUL was discovered from the marine bacterium Wenyingzhuangia fucanilytica CZ1127T, and a repertoire of alginate lyases within it was cloned, expressed and characterized. The four alginate lyases in PUL demonstrated similar optimal reaction conditions: maximum enzyme activity at 35‐50 °C, pH 8.0‐9.0. The results of action pattern indicated that they were two PL7 endolytic bifunctional enzymes (Aly7A and Aly7B), a PL6 exolytic bifunctional enzyme (Aly6A) and a PL17 exolytic M‐specific enzyme (Aly17A). The UPLC‐MS technique was employed to reveal the synergistic effect of the four enzymes. The end products of Aly7A were further degraded by Aly7B and eventually generated oligosaccharides with disaccharide to heptasaccharide. The oligosaccharide products were completely degraded to monosaccharides by Aly6A, while it was unable to directly degrade alginate. Aly17A could also produce monosaccharides by cleaving the M‐blocks of oligosaccharide products, as well as the M‐blocks of polysaccharides. The combination of these enzymes resulted in the complete degradation of alginate to monosaccharides.CONCLUSIONA new alginate PUL was mined and four novel alginate lyases in the PUL were expressed and characterized. The four cooperative alginate lyases provide novel tools for alginate degradation and biological fermentation.This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

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Venture capital has emerged as an important intermediary in financial markets, providing capital to young high-technology firms that might have otherwise gone unfunded. Venture capitalists have developed a variety of mechanisms to overcome the problems that emerge at each stage of the investment process. This study selected the China Venture (CV) source database for venture capital (VC) research in the Chinese Internet industry and extracted information on investment time, VC firms, and investment amount. Combining theoretical analysis and empirical research, the differences between the leader community and the self-organizing community in the Chinese Internet industry are analyzed and the reasons and paths leading to the change of investment performance are determined. It is found that the information dissemination of core nodes promotes the information dissemination of leaders’ communities and the two kinds of organizational learning have different effects on investment performance in the two communities. Under experimental learning and information dissemination, the investment performance of the leader community is greater than the self-organizing community. The outcomes of this research can be used as a reference for the sustainable development of the Chinese Internet industry.