Nonprofit organization

Summary

A nonprofit organization (NPO) or non-profit organization, also known as a non-business entity, or nonprofit institution, is a legal entity organized and operated for a collective, public or social benefit, in contrary with an entity that operates as a business aiming to generate a profit for its owners. A nonprofit is subject to the non-distribution constraint: any revenues that exceed expenses must be committed to the organization's purpose, not taken by private parties. An array of organizations are nonprofit, including some political organizations, schools, business associations, churches, social clubs, and consumer cooperatives. Nonprofit entities may seek approval from governments to be tax-exempt, and some may also qualify to receive tax-deductible contributions, but an entity may incorporate as a nonprofit entity without securing tax-exempt status. Key aspects of nonprofits are accountability, trustworthiness, honesty, and openness to every person who has invested time, mone

Official source

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonprofit_organization

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Institutions, Innovation and Public Health

Viviana Carolina Munoz Tellez de Kieffer

This study concerns the economics of innovation in the area of medical innovation -new diagnostics, medicines and vaccines-, and in particular how innovation contributes to meeting public health needs. Significant advances have taken place in medical science and technological innovations to prevent and treat diseases that are associated to the strong research and innovation system characteristic of the biomedical and pharmaceutical industry in developed countries. However, firms are reluctant to mobilize this capacity towards disease areas where there are significant health needs but the market is not profitable. As a result, less socially valuable innovation takes place than would otherwise be desirable. This problem is analysed in this study through institutional analysis, applied to the area of neglected diseases. The term neglected diseases is used to refer to a group of diseases that affect over 1 billion people worldwide, persist under conditions of poverty and are concentrated mainly in developing countries. Previous studies of the problem of the gap of innovation in neglected diseases have focused on identifying the market failures that cause for-profit firms to invest very little in R&D and innovation in neglected diseases, and advance ideas for new or additional incentives that could encourage greater participation of firms in this area, such as guaranteed payments for R&D efforts or new medical products developed. This study takes on a different approach, centred on analyxing the institutional framework in which R&D and innovation dynamics take place. In particular, the study analyses a recent phenomena: the appearance of a new form of institutional experiment - private non-profit entities organized as product development partnerships (PDPs) that act as "system integrators" to leverage the resources and capabilities of a network of public, philanthropic and private sector partners towards R&D in neglected diseases. The study also examines how this novel PDP institution responds to a well-known incentive mechanism in medical innovation - intellectual property rights. The study finds that PDPs respond differently to IPRs than for-profit firms, and this indicates there are variations in the value, use and impact of IPRs under different institutional settings, beyond the firm. Finally, the study analyses the challenges in leveraging traditional medicinal knowledge to address health needs, particularly in developing countries, and finds that as the traditional institutions that have supported traditional medicine are under strain, new institutions are needed to support this knowledge as it becomes fragile and is more likely to suffer from deterioration or even disappearance, as compared to scientific knowledge.

EPFL2015

WHO WALKS THE TALK? VENTURE CAPITAL FUNDS’ ACTIONS AFTER SYMBOLIC SELF-REGULATION OF LIMITED AND GENERAL PARTNERS

Giovanni Liotta

This paper investigates if organizations use symbolic self-regulation to escape from normative pressure without complying in practices. I argue that, when an explicit regulatory environment does not support self-regulation initiatives, opportunistic organizations might reduce their efforts to conform to the normative ideals through real actions. The ‘walking of the talk’, which is the implementation of actions that go beyond symbolic response, might also be discouraged by alternative means to obtain organizational legitimacy such as an organization’s reputation and status. These hypotheses are tested on a sample of venture capital (VC) funds whose limited and general partners might have voluntarily decided to join the United Nations’ Principles of Responsible Investment (UNPRI) initiative. Empirical findings show that VC funds’ likelihood to invest in clean technology companies decreases when one of the fund’s stakeholders (i.e. general or limited partners) joins the UNPRI initiative. Results also suggest that this effect is conditional upon the reputation and status of the VC fund.

2016

In this paper, we present an exact (i.e. non-approximated) and linear measurement model for hybrid AC/DC micro-grids for recursive state estimation (SE). More specifically, an exact linear model of a voltage source converter (VSC) is proposed. It relies on the complex VSC modulation index to relate the quantities at the converters DC side to the phasors at the AC side. The VSC model is derived from a transformer-like representation and accounts for the VSC conduction and switching losses. In the case of three-phase unbalanced grids, the measurement model is extended using the symmetrical component decomposition where each sequence individually affects the DC quantities. Synchronized measurements are provided by phasor measurement units and DC measurement units in the DC system. To make the SE more resilient to vive step changes in the grid states, an adaptive Kalman Filter that uses an approximation of the prediction-error covariance estimation method is proposed. This approximation reduces the computational speed significantly with only a limited reduction in the SE performance. The hybrid SE is validated in an EMTP-RV time-domain simulation of the CIGRE AC benchmark micro-grid that is connected to a DC grid using 4 VSCs. Bad data detection and identification using the largest normalised residual is assessed with respect to such a system. Furthermore, the proposed method is compared with a non-linear weighted least squares SE in terms of accuracy and computational time.

2022

Institutions, Innovation and Public Health

Viviana Carolina Munoz Tellez de Kieffer

EPFL2015