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We examine whether the probability of innovating a company’s business model towards the Industry 4.0 paradigm is affected by external institutional support and family leadership. Industry 4.0 is the information-intensive transformation of global manufacturing enabled by Internet technologies aimed at reinventing products and services from design and engineering to manufacturing. Using a sample of 3000 firms from a corporate survey on the manufacturing industry in Italy, our results showed that family leadership has a significant positive influence on the adoption of Industry 4.0 business models, but only in terms of family ownership. By contrast, family management has a negative influence on the probability of adopting a new business model. However, this negative influence is almost totally offset by the presence of the Triple Helix, i.e. the external support by public institutions and universities, which counterbalances the lower propensity of family managers to adopt Industry 4.0 business models. This supporting role only occurs when institutions and universities act together.

Universities are one of the key actors within national and regional innovation systems. The nature of university-industry collaboration has changed during the last decades and it varies across countries and regions. Different factors determine the interaction among both organizations, from those related to the industrial structure\ud of the territory to others related to institutional and legal frameworks. In this paper we aim at adding to the understanding of this process based on the comparison between two European regions, Apulia in Italy and Galicia in Spain. Our results show that a progressive transition from a separated to a more integrated approach has\ud occurred at the relational framework affecting universities and industry in both regions. Public policies, particularly from the regional level, have been relevant for promoting university-industry collaboration in Galicia and Apulia.\ud Nevertheless, there still remain cultural and institutional barriers, both from the academy and business sphere, which impede a closer and more fruitful interaction.\ud Besides, the poor innovative culture of traditional industries which dominate in both regions, might affect university-industry interaction. However, an adjustment of the university offer in terms of research is also needed as we observe that collaboration is too much biased by the university scientific and departmental specialization and too\ud little by local and regional industrial specialization

The ITSs (Intelligent Transportation Systems) are part of the ICT infrastructure and are built taking into account numerous legal and organisational conditions and individual needs of the users. They are the answer for wide requirements due to implementation of innovations in road transport. The primary objective of using ITSs is to improve the efficiency of traffic and traffic safety. The aim of this paper is to present a technical approach aiming to model the impact of environmental conditions such as urban traffic, visibility, other weather conditions and road conditions on road traffic safety, using the fuzzy logic and trying to explain also the economic and legal determinants of road safety as "non technical" parts.