Nova SBE — A School at the Frontier Between Business and Technology
Hands-on learning is core to Nova SBE’s teaching ethos and central to its concern that students feel at home in a world where digital, data and technological revolutions are driving business innovation.
In February 2018, a group of students in hardhats and high-viz jackets travelled to the noisy construction site from which the Carcavelos campus of the Nova School for Business &Economics was rapidly emerging. The short bus trip from Lisbon brought them to what João Castro, their professor, proudly claims to have been the first class held in the new buildings.
Amid the dust and clutter of an unfinished amphitheater, Professor Castro set his Product Design and Development students the task of designing a new product or service for the community of 3000 people that would soon occupy the innovative campus.
“Almost 250 valid concepts emerged and, by the end of the course, student teams had selected, designed, prototyped and presented their best ideas,” says Professor Castro, head of Nova SBE’s Centre for Digital Business and Technology. “This was pure learning by doing. Our ambitions for the new campus are big and everyone is invited to participate.”
Hands-on learning is core to Nova SBE’s teaching ethos and central to its concern that students feel at home in a world where digital, data and technological revolutions are driving business innovation.
“Management or economics cannot be taught today without also imparting a solid understanding of technology,” says Pedro Santa-Clara, president of the non-profit Alfredo de Sousa Foundation, which supports Nova SBE. “Information science is the future and we want our students to be skilled translators between the worlds of business and technology.”
The state-of-the-art Experience Hub places technology at the heart of the new campus. The 200 sq. metre building with a 7-metre-high ceiling is being created in partnership with Cisco Systems and Microsoft as a place where students can “get their hands dirty” experimenting with the possibilities of robotics, 3D printers, augmented reality and other advanced technologies.
“We’ve dedicated a huge physical space to technology and placed it at a strategic point in the campus because we want it to act as a meeting place where students, faculty and companies can come together and explore possibilities,” says Professor Castro. “We see it as a hands-on classroom where students, researchers and companies can innovate, design and prototype new business ideas.”
Chuck Robbins, Cisco’s chairman and chief executive, says the Hub, which uses the company’s Digital Network Architecture, is equipped to link up with the international network of Cisco Innovation Centers in a way that will help “drive innovation in Portugal and across the world”. Other partners supporting the Hub include two leading Portuguese technology firms: Outsystems, the software development platform, and Vision-Box, which uses biometrics to build digital identity management systems.
As part of its commitment to bridging the gap between business and technology, Nova SBE has forged a partnership with Singularity University, the Silicon Valley thinktank that also provides educational programs and acts as business incubator. In October 2018, the first SingularityU Portugal Summit was held at Cascais, with global technology leaders including Ramez Naam, Esther Wojcicki and Vivienne Ming addressing subjects ranging from energy to ethics in an age of technological disruption.
Nova SBE also runs the SingularityU Portugal Global Impact Challenge in a partnership that includes Beta-I, a Portuguese company that fosters innovation, and the Municipality of Cascais. The Challenge is an annual competition for innovative projects that help solve pressing public problems. Recent winners include SkinSoul, an app for reducing the time taken to diagnose skin cancers, and eMove, a digital platform that makes it easier for electricity consumers to compare contracts.
“The aim of our partnership with SingularityU is to inspire our students, faculty and corporate partners to examine ways in which technology can be used to tackle the major problems of humanity,” says Miguel Moreira, an advisor to Nova SBE’s Centre for Digital Business and Technology who heads the linkup. “We want to motivate them to experiment with technology and challenge them to transform their ideas into potential businesses.”
Moving to the new campus at Carcavelos has enabled Nova SBE to create a cutting-edge technological platform from scratch. “We’ve had the opportunity to start afresh and lay down the necessary infrastructure for high-speed connectivity and technological development that will help us keep pace with the rapidly changing business world,” says Professor Castro.
The aim, says Professor Santa-Clara, is to develop almost as a hybrid between a business school and a data science school. “We’ll never equal the status of Harvard Business School by trying to replicate what they do,” he says. “Our aim is to differentiate ourselves through a strong engagement with outside partners, big investments in data science and technology and an emphasis on entrepreneurship and innovation.”
In another example of an outside partnership, Nova SBE has teamed up with the University of Chicago to create a summer program called Data Science for Social Good (DSSG) in Europe. The goal is to bring together aspiring data scientists and resource-constrained organizations to develop prototypes addressing important social issues.
Data science and technology are already key disciplines across all Nova SBE’s syllabuses, from undergraduates who use Python to study computer programming to Master’s students focusing on management, finance or economics. The school is also creating a stand-alone Master’s in Data Science for Business program.
“Technology and data-driven decision-making will be at the core of future businesses,” says Leid Zejnilovic, the Nova SBE professor who heads the DSSG in Europe program. “Students are thirsty for knowledge in this area. They feel the world is changing and they want to be part of the change. Our main aim is not to create data scientists as such, but people who can build bridges between the worlds of data science, business and society in general.”
As Professor Santa-Clara puts it: “our goal is to be a school that is open to the wider world, from partnerships with companies, government, NGOs and local authorities to joint projects with other schools and universities. We want to be the opposite of an ivory tower.”
Nova SBE is a leading school in the areas of Economics, Finance, and Management with its Bachelors’, Masters’, Ph.D.’s, MBA’s, and Executive Education programs. It is amongst Europe’s 30 best schools with more than 3000 students from more than 70 different countries, with programs acknowledged by the Financial Times. It is also among the selected Triple Crown world schools group, being the only Portuguese school classified by Eduniversal as a “Universal Business School”, having five Eduniversal Palms and its Master’s in Economics recognized in Eduniversal’s European Top 3.
Today the school is working with companies, institutions, organizations, and society as an open space in which the different actors in an ecosystem of progress can play a significant and positive role in transforming our world. After its first 40 years, Nova SBE intends to continue as what it has always been — a school that is open to the challenges and opportunities of the future. Its new campus in Carcavelos is an experience of the future for Portugal, Europe, and the World.
