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This article explores the utilization of public-private funding models in European universities and its implications for community empowerment initiatives, particularly University-Community Engagement (UCE) projects. A systematic literature review (SLR) was conducted using the Scopus database, screening 50 articles relating to public-private funding models in European universities. The study reveals that while public-private funding models have gained traction in the academic sphere, they primarily focus on supporting applied science research projects. In contrast, the funding of projects solely oriented toward community empowerment remains limited, with only one article addressing this potential. The findings highlight the challenges associated with employing public-private funding for UCE projects with a strong emphasis on community empowerment. Public-private funding, typically sourced from industry partners, tends to prioritize product innovations and productivity enhancements, posing a mismatch with the social justice-oriented nature of UCE. This discrepancy underscores a significant research gap in UCE and calls for innovative approaches to develop supportive funding frameworks that can effectively sustain UCE initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study on the determinants of heterogeneity in firm profitability. The researchers proposed that all types of effects should be considered in order to acquire more accurate results in the presence of covariance between various effects regressions corresponding to all kinds of possible models. They also used the Amadeus database maintained and collected by Bureau van Dijk, which features balance sheet and additional data for almost 14 million companies in 40 countries in Europe. They found that differences throughout countries seem to have little significance in explaining heterogeneity in the profitability of a firm.

The activities of the FP7 Project "Distributed Energy Resources Research Infrastructure" (DERri) are oriented to integration of European research community trough the provision of Users Access to a unique portfolio of important European Laboratories in field of Distributed Energy Resources focusing mainly system and architectural aspects of smart energy network based on distributed generation. The new conditions of decentralised generation determine the necessity to perform tests, to compile the new data base and new experience, to have large multidisciplinary and competitive research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we report a system for working with distributed fuzzy logic and rule systems, based on a mapping to logic programming with easily accessible Prolog tools. In short, we outline an approach for performing joins of fuzzy databases and procedures in terms of type-1 fuzzy logic programs, and generalize this approach by considering contextaware logic programs. The main use cases include aggregating fuzzy descriptions and managing distributed procedures that can be seamlessly integrated to context-aware logic programs, for implementing views to the global knowledge base. The main contribution of this article lies in the novel approach of expressing joins of fuzzy databases and fuzzy inference systems in terms of the logic programming paradigm, generalizing this framework in terms of explicit assertion and interpretation context(s), and then reducing these systems into Prolog programs. To illustrate our work, we discuss the approach in terms of simple examples, drawn from concrete applications, and discuss the implications. The motivation for the work stems from a European network of excellence thriving to establish a distributed open knowledge system based on the ideology of open source communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study how the interaction between financial and human resource slack affects venture performance. For this purpose, we use a large-scale longitudinal database comprising privately-held technology-based ventures located in six European countries. Results show that the effects of both financial slack and human resource slack on venture performance are inverse U-shaped. More significantly, the interaction between financial slack and human resource slack is negative. Our findings indicate that having both high levels of financial and human resource slack or low levels of financial and human resource slack are detrimental for venture performance. We discuss these findings from both academic and practical points of view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]