Nova SBE opens campus to corporate innovation

Nova SBE created a new department to open the University to the world. Pedro Brito, the co-founder of Jason Associates and Mercer’s country business leader, is the one leading the project. All this because Nova wishes to evolve at the same speed as people and companies do.

“Companies’ expectation changed over the years. Five years ago, companies looked at universities as instruments to format incoming employees. Now, the expectation is much different: it has to do with the impact and application of knowledge, the agility that is not easily found within companies and also individual transformation. That means that we need to make the excellence of knowledge into something more practical”, Brito told Pessoas Magazine (ECO)’s September edition.

“The major philosophical transformation is that we must not just be on talent’s side but also on companies’, helping them to transform themselves. Meaning then that we are not just here to prepare their future human resources but we are also here to support them with their strategies, innovation and any dimension a company needs to adapt to this new reality. This is something new as we were the first to get to this stage. We can even note a genuine interest from companies on adhering to such project”, Daniel Traça, Nova SBE’s Dean, explains.

In more practical terms, the recently inaugurated executive education and business transformation department will be focused on leadership programmes to be designed by professionals from both the academic and corporate world, also aiming to develop programmes to address the challenges of SMEs. “We have co-designed these programmes with companies to ensure knowledge is effectively applied with an impact on real-life companies. That is our ambition. Not just to transmit knowledge but also to give it a more practical application”, Pedro Brito argues.

The idea of creating a corporate-focused department emerged from a very concrete need that Nova SBE has detected: if previously universities were more reactionary towards the outside-world organisations’ demands, today it is precisely the opposite that we observe. “We have a tremendous goodwill, but what we do is to go after companies to understand which are their short, medium and long-term challenges, more than simply to deliver them with a business plan”, Brito adds.

“We are putting our academics and research at the service of corporate world. How? Not just in a traditional perspective of teaching but also meeting with companies to reflect together with them about their challenges and to ensure that knowledge is applied on their daily activities.