Nova SBE — a school for accelerating startups
Nova School of Business & Economics has been the launch pad for many of Portugal’s most successful start-ups.
Nova School of Business & unEconomics has been the launch pad for many of Portugal’s most successful startups. Among others, Uniplaces, the student accommodation booking platform, Go Natural, the health food chain, GuestU, which develops apps for the tourism industry, and Raize, the country’s first peer-to-peer lender, all originated with Nova SBE Alumni or faculty members.
“You can feel it in the air. This is a very entrepreneurial school where everything is possible,” says Miguel Muñoz Duarte, a co-leader of the Venture Lab, Nova SBE’s entrepreneurship and innovation center. “Our whole ecosystem has evolved to help entrepreneurs shape their ideas, enrich their skillsets and find the inspiration to build their own businesses.”
The launch of the Nova SBE Venture Lab in early 2017 fulfilled an ambition to build a dedicated infrastructure to foster Nova SBE’s natural entrepreneurial spirit. “Our aim is to leverage the expertise, value, and know-how that already exist in the school to support start-ups in a more structured and practical way,” says Joana Barba, another co-leader of the Venture Lab, whose own doctoral thesis focused on how business schools can best support entrepreneurs.
Managed by a 12-strong team of academics and businesspeople, all with hands-on experience of creating and managing successful start-ups, the Venture Lab runs a start-up acceleration programme called Zero Gravity, as well as providing mentoring, consulting and talent-spotting services and organizing summer schools and other entrepreneurship courses.
The Lab works closely with the academic arm of Nova SBE to keep business creativity and innovation at the heart of the school’s educational programmes. From undergraduate degrees to Master’s, MBA and executive education courses, entrepreneurship is a core part of the curriculum. A Master’s in Business Entrepreneurship and Impact (MBE) is currently in the pipeline and will involve “a high level of hands-on learning”, says Professor Muñoz Duarte.
The Nova SBE Venture Lab is a self-financing unit within Nova SBE that itself operates with a start-up mindset. It was created in response to increasing demand from students for practical entrepreneurial skills. “A decade ago Nova was educating economics and business students for jobs in banks and consulting companies, the ministry of finance and the central bank,” says Afonso Eça, an assistant professor at Nova SBE who is also part of the Venture Lab team. “Today, more and more students want to create their own businesses, work with an existing start-up or help bigger companies innovate.”
“Five years ago no more than 20 percent of students on my entrepreneurship course would put their hands up when I asked if they hoped to start their own business,” says Professor Muñoz Duarte. “Today it’s more than half, and if I add ‘at some time in your career’, it goes past 90 %.”
Zero Gravity, the Venture Lab’s start-up accelerator, offers students the opportunity to “get their hands dirty” working with real start-ups. In October 2017, it invited B2B start-ups from across the world to apply for a place on its first accelerator course. From 335 applications, it selected five. These include a sports betting platform from Portugal and Cargofive from Argentina, a start-up that develops software for automating and optimizing freight forwarding. Zero Gravity also helps start-ups in the programme with financing from a Nova SBE Alumni fund.
At least one Nova SBE student is assigned to work alongside each start-up as a “junior entrepreneur”. This idea has proved so successful that, despite minimal publicity, more than 130 students have already signed up to work with start-ups in future Zero Gravity programmes. “It’s exciting for the students and a source of additional talent for the start-ups,” says Professor Muñoz Duarte.
Professor Eça’s own business career is an example of how start-ups can benefit from Nova SBE’s entrepreneurial ecosystem. He is a co-founder of Raize, a peer-to-peer lending platform for financing small and medium-sized firms, which in July 2018 attracted €5.5 million from more than 1,400 investors when it was successfully floated on the Lisbon stock exchange.
“The connection to Nova SBE was very important,” he says. “Benefitting from a pool of academic and business expertise and hearing the perspective of people who really understand how the economy works was immensely valuable. Nova students were also the natural future clients of our platform and their enthusiasm helped spread the word.”
The Venture Lab is now engaged in supplying similar support to start-ups, entrepreneurs and innovators in a more structured and effective way. “Our aim is to engage more deeply with start-ups and customize the support we give them,” says Ms. Barba. “We want to move beyond providing standard programmes and become a company builder that can offer specialized technical support whenever needed.”
As well as Zero Gravity, whose next accelerator programme is expected to expand to 10 start-ups, the Venture Lab runs “decelerator programmes”. These currently take the form of eight-week “start-up retreats” in Madeira, where people can take a step back and work on the basis of their business models and value propositions with an expert team.
“Being a very open school, especially here at the new campus, is one of Nova’s key advantages,” says Professor Muñoz Duarte. “The school has really opened up to the market, to companies, and to stakeholders and that’s really important for start-ups. We can also draw on a large pool of successful Alumni and corporate partners who form part of a rich ecosystem for fostering entrepreneurship.”
At the new Carcavelos campus, students work alongside start-ups in the Zero Gravity programme and participate as sophisticated consumers providing feedback to experimental projects in banking and retail distribution being run on the site by Santander, Jerónimo Martins, the Portuguese food retailer, and other corporate partners.
“A business school needs much more than academic proficiency,” says Professor Muñoz Duarte. “As well as knowledge and expertise, Nova SBE seeks to impart an eagerness for innovation, disruption, and entrepreneurship, a sense of ‘try-it-yourself’. When you put all this together, you create a space where people can flourish.”
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.
