Abstract
Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present a methodology for incubating business ideas in rural communities in Portugal. The work provides an example of a bottom-up approach to rural entrepreneurship. Design/methodology/approach: The paper analyses case study of an entrepreneurial support organisation conceived and used in rural European regions and aiming at local development through entrepreneurial boost. Findings: Although the methodology for incubating business ideas was adapted from a similar situation in France, its originality comes from the description of how the awareness of local specificities requires a calibration of the framework. Research limitations/implications: The case study is the outcome of a pioneering study of incubation of business ideas in rural areas. Further research needs to be taken in order to claim generalisability of these findings to other less favoured target groups. Practical implications: The incubation of business ideas can be used to encourage local development in declining rural regions. It is important to calibrate the framework used to the local/regional reality. Originality/value: Apart from being innovative in providing a supportive entrepreneurial infrastructure with mentoring people-based support in the creation of new firms in rural areas, it is also a nation-wide entrepreneurial service innovation. © Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

Abstract
Purpose - The main purpose of the paper is to provide an example of a bottom-up approach to entrepreneurial policy and its mismatch with the top-down approach SMEs policy. Design/methodology/approach - The paper analyses a case study of an entrepreneurial support organisation that addresses local development in rural areas. Findings - The paper highlights the important role of innovation in rural areas and the need to close the gap between entrepreneurial policy and SMEs policy. Research limitations/implications - The main limitation stems from the fact that it is the outcome of a single case study. One practical implication is that the incubation of business ideas poses a challenge when there is a mismatch between entrepreneurial policy and SMEs policy.

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A bilevel facility location problem in which the clients choose suppliers based on their own preferences is studied. It is shown that the coopertative and anticooperative statements can be reduced to a particular case in which every client has a linear preference order on the set of facilities to be opened. For this case, various reductions of the bilevel problem to integer linear programs are considered. A new statement of the problem is proposed that is based on a family of valid inequalities that are related to the problem on a pair of matrices and the set packing problem. It is shown that this formulation is stronger than the other known formulations from the viewpoint of the linear relaxation and the integrality gap. © 2009 Pleiades Publishing, Ltd.

Abstract
This article addresses several variants of the two-dimensional bin packing problem. In the most basic version of the problem it is intended to pack a given number of rectangular items with given sizes in rectangular bins in such a way that the number of bins used is minimized. Different heuristic approaches (greedy, local search, and variable neighbourhood descent) are proposed for solving four guillotine two-dimensional bin packing problems. The heuristics are based on the definition of a packing sequence for items and in a set of criteria for packing one item in a current partial solution. Several extensions are introduced to deal with issues pointed out by two furniture companies. Extensive computational results on instances from the literature and from the two furniture companies are reported and compared with optimal solutions, solutions from other five (meta) heuristics and, for a small set of instances, with the ones used in the companies.