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Dissertation Supervision

At CATÓLICA-LISBON there are two possible options for dissertation supervision – you can choose to follow a Dissertation Seminar or an Independent Process. The Dissertation seminars are the recommended process at CATÓLICA-LISBON, as they are structured to ensure continuous feedback from the advisor(s).

Dissertation Seminar - Academic Offer & Syllabi

A Dissertation Seminar is a group of students that are developing dissertations in related topics, all supervised by one or two faculty members, who will be their advisor(s). Dissertation Seminars are designed and structured as instructor-led sessions, group discussions, and individual meetings, ensuring continuous feedback, usually lasting three to four months. The syllabus of the seminar will include the overview and objectives, content, required background (if applicable), the schedules of that seminar, among other relevant information. All seminars are lectured in English.

Please note that the enrolment is processed in Qualtrics, on a first-come, first-served basis. Closer to the enrolment date the students receive an email with instructions and with the platform link. The enrolment dates can be found in the webpage "Dates and Deadlines" link HERE.

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Open to students from the M.Sc. in Business Analytics.

 

Disruptive Forecasting and Business Analytics

Prof. Pedro Fernandes

This seminar is oriented towards creative and open-minded students from the MSc in Business Analytics that aim to develop an original research (dissertation) in unconventional, or even exotic topics concerned with forecasting, predictive analytics and other relevant areas.

If you have an original, or even «strange» research idea, or a new algorithm, application or product with a high disruptive potential, this is the right place for you. The main goal is to promote a start-up and collaborative culture among the seminar’s participants that could result in real original researches or even new businesses. If you dream to create your own start-up company, this is the seminar for you and for your potential co-founders from CLSBE.

With this general framework in mind, each student should define, right from the first seminar’s session, a relevant and focused research question that should avoid, cautiously, wide-range themes or topics, noting that Machine Learning (ML) / Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a complex and heterogeneous field with a lot of scientific production. Thus, each student should proceed a solid research work, focused on pertinent problems or questions, methods and original applications with high-potential impact and value-added.

The aim of this seminar is to facilitate, in an interactive and brainstorming fashion, the path of each student towards her/his own research, as well as the team’s interdisciplinary interaction and mutual learning, always having in mind that innovation, namely, in advanced analytics loves disruption, interaction and R&D of new approaches, methods and algorithms.

In order to facilitate the dissertations’ development, some examples of research themes, questions and methods will be provided. Students could adopt, recycle or adapt them for their own works. The topics to be covered are, namely, the following:

Forecasting with robust filters;
Forecasting at scale, namely, with Facebook’s Prophet or UBER’s Theta method;
Forecasting with reinforcement learning (RL);
Forecasting with regression trees (RT);
Forecasting and data analysis with Microsoft Power BI;
Innovative methods to combine forecasts;
Natural language processing (NLP): intelligent reasoning versus text as data;
Analysis of urban networks using social media data.

Driving Growth Through Algorithmic Marketing

Prof. Nuno Paiva

In today's era of algorithmic marketing, a new paradigm has emerged. Algorithmic marketing can be defined as a data-driven approach that leverages automated decision-making systems, AI, and ML to enhance marketing strategies. While the artistic approach of the past is no longer the sole driving force, human expertise and creativity continue to play a crucial role alongside these technologies. Rather than replacing human input, algorithmic marketing empowers marketers with powerful tools to optimize their campaigns.

The advent of digitalization has acted as a catalyst, enabling the collection of vast amounts of data, and providing opportunities to reach consumers through one-to-one mediums. Through digital channels and platforms, marketers can gather valuable insights into consumer behaviour, preferences, and interactions. This wealth of data, combined with AI and ML algorithms, allows for highly targeted and personalized marketing efforts.

Human marketers play a vital role in algorithmic marketing by leveraging the insights provided by AI and ML algorithms. They make informed decisions, interpret data, and add strategic value to the process. Human creativity, context, and intuition complement the algorithmic systems, resulting in more effective and impactful marketing strategies. The relationship between humans and algorithmic marketing is one of synergy, where the combination of human expertise, digital data, and AI-driven analysis enables businesses to reach the right audience at the right time with the right message. This ultimately leads to enhanced customer experiences and improved return on investment (ROI).

Using Interpretability and Explainability in Machine Learning as a tool for Decision Making 

Prof. Ana Guedes

In the context of machine learning and artificial intelligence, explainability (xAI) and interpretability are often used interchangeably. However, interpretability is usually focused on being able to discern the mechanics without necessarily knowing why, while explainability if focused on explaining what is happening in human terms. A related area of research is Causal Inference, which focus on extracting causal relationships from data, whereas interpretable AI is concerned with describing general relationships between data and not with distinguishing causal from non causal effects.

These areas are concerned with enhancing trustworthiness and accountability of predictive models. This is driven both by legislation, such as the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and by the need to better understand the system being investigated and to understand the reason why a model might fail or to ensure fairness of predictions.

Conventionally, there are 2 different types of approaches: one focused on creating interpretable models in the first place (such as rule-based algorithms), the other focused on proposing ways of extracting insight from already trained black-box models by the use of local or global explanations (using approaches such as LIME or SHAP). 

Rather than focusing solely on performance, xAI aims to explain how specific decisions or recommendations are reached. The main advantages reside in the improved explainability and transparency, faster adoption by the business, faster debugging by developers and enabling of auditing for regulatory requirements. Reported use cases range from customer retention to claims management, insurance pricing, banking, marketing, fraud detection or healthcare and life sciences. 

 

 

Content Published - November, 8th 2023; Syllabus Published - TBD

Open to students from the MSc in Economics (all majors).

 

Applied Economics

Prof. Joana Silva

The dissertation seminar is designed to help students write their Master's thesis on a topic related to Applied Micro and Macroeconomics. It comprises a mix of group and individual mandatory sessions. During the course, students will be asked to present their current work and to comment on the work of others. The scientific project may be either empirical or combine theoretical with empirical work. The seminar begins with group sections showing how micro data from Government programs or firms’ transactions combined with quantitative methods can be used to solve important social problems, answer long-standing questions in macroeconomics and improve public policies. The examples provided will also show how this type of data and methods can be applied to assess the drivers and implications of firm behavior. The second part of the seminar consists of in-depth discussions of empirical papers and class presentations. 

 

Content Published - November, 8th 2023; Syllabus Published - TBD

Open to students from M.Sc. in Finance, International M.Sc. in Finance, M.Sc. in Economics (Specialization in Finance & Banking), and International M.Sc. in Management (Specialization in Corporate Finance).

 

Empirical Analysis on Financial Institutions and Markets

Prof. Carla Soares 

How do decisions taken by policymakers influence the financing of firms and households? Policy decisions are transmitted to the economy via several channels, some of which work through financial markets and institutions. Both monetary and regulatory policies have strong effects on institutions' incentives and market pricing. The last decade has been proliferated in policy measures aimed at containing the effects of the crisis and in the revision of regulation aimed at providing a more stable and robust financial system. In this seminar, students can choose a specific policy event/measure and assess its effects. This will allow students both to identify relevant policy events and how to properly evaluate the channels through which the effects are transmitted to either markets or institutions. 

Empirical Corporate Finance

Prof. Diana Bonfim 

The theoretical and empirical literature on corporate finance is wide and ever-growing. Classical capital structure decisions continue to be revisited, and new questions are emerging permanently.  In this workshop we will review the recent literature on empirical corporate finance, focusing on the new challenges faced by researchers in this domain.

Equity Valuation

Prof. José Tudela Martins

This workshop aims to provide an overview of equity valuation methodologies, offering a set of skills that will allow students to work in the “investment advising” community.

Financial Insights: Exploring Contemporary Corporate Finance and Climate Dynamics

Prof. José Garcia Revelo

The workshop's initial emphasis will be on selecting a research topic and assessing its feasibility. Initially, we will delve into recent developments in the empirical corporate finance literature, highlighting trending topics and challenges. Subsequently, students interested in workshop participation will deliver concise, 10-minute presentations on their chosen research questions. To further delve, into some possible topics you may be interested in, kindly consult the syllabus.

Financing Decisions and Credit Risk

Prof. Mário Meira

This workshop guides students in their dissertation on topics related to Financing Decisions and Credit risk. The main goal is to help students relate firms’ financing decisions, such as increase or decrease of leverage and equity, with firms that present different levels of credit risk. It is crucial for a financial manager and a financial analyst to be able to understand how firms behave when their perceived credit risk changes, and how financial markets react to such events. These analyses are done using big data sets created by students combined with econometric and statistical tools. For this effect, candidates should feel comfortable using statistical and econometric software like Stata or Python.

Mergers and Acquisitions

Prof. António Borges de Assunção

This workshop will provide an overview of the main equity valuation methodologies and the use of Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) to perform corporate reorganizations and increase shareholder value, presenting a toolset that will allow students to work in the “investments / financial advisory” community. There will be a strong conceptual approach based on academic papers. We will also discuss why and how M&A transactions take place, their role in the economy, and how they perform from the perspective of the shareholders and other stakeholders. In addition, in some sessions, we will discuss a current /” real world” transaction which should help to provide further illustration of the relevant ideas covered in the workshop.

Portfolio Management and Sustainability

Prof. António Baldaque da Silva

Everyday billions of people worldwide make decisions about how to allocate their resources, being it time, talent or treasure. Many delegate financial investment decisions to professional investors – from banks, to asset managers, insurance companies, pensions funds, etc. The way these agents upheld their fiduciary duty has clear impact on the well-being of their clients and - through the financial system - a pivotal role in bringing growth and prosperity to our societies.

Good investment and portfolio management is underpinned by a solid understanding of the current scientific paradigm around investing and its limitations. It must also be based on client’s preferences, which are increasingly focused on sustainability and climate change. 

Sustainable Finance

Prof. Zöe Venter

Both financial and economic decisions worldwide have become increasingly influenced by the scarcity of resources, the search for profits through efficiency, and the ongoing climate change battle. As such, the move to a sustainable financial system has emerged as one of the main challenges of the present generation. Sustainable finance is the process whereby we take into account environmental, social and governance considerations when making financial investment decisions. This should lead to more long-term investments in sustainable activities and projects. This seminar offers participants the opportunity study the impact that sustainable practices have on a number of factors such as bank loan costs, stock returns and profitability. Participants will also have the opportunity to look at the impact that the increased climate change awareness has on stock markets.

Venture Capital Investments

Prof. Fatima Shuwaikh 

One external means for equity financing, economic growth, and innovation are venture capital investments, which have become highly influential in the funding of entrepreneurial companies. To back their growth, entrepreneurial companies have commonly directed to venture capitalists, who often provide expertise in setting new ventures into successes, good hands-on help, and money. This seminar outlines the concept of corporate venture capital (CVC) from two main aspects: the perspective of entrepreneurial companies and the perspective of established firms (investors), focusing on the investment-related issues in the CVC program. 

 

Content Published - November, 08th 2023; Syllabus Published - TBD

Open to students from the M.Sc. in Business, International M.Sc. in Management (all Specializations), and M.Sc. in Management (both specializations).

 

Applied Research Topics on Strategy

Prof. Pedro Parada

The Dissertation Seminar on research topics in Strategy Builds-up on the papers written by the faculty of the seminar around key areas in strategy, mostly Corporate Strategy, international expansion and global management, and strategic change. The basic bibliography and references are the practice-oriented publication of the faculty with complementary readings. Depending on the topic selected by students they will receive further references and recommendations.

Automation and The Future Workplace

Prof. Filipa de Almeida e Prof. Cristina Mendonça

What we do for a living, « work » has long been a central theme in our lives. « Work » is important not only as it brings us the financial means to live but also as it can be a great source of meaning, contributing strongly to our identity, to being who we are. « Work » has been a changing idea reflecting its different realities over time. Right now, however, « work » is being disrupted as arguably, never before. AI and other technological advances (e.g., socially assistive robots, AI-based decision support systems, ...) promise to disrupt every aspect of human life, from the domestic sphere to organizations, to global markets. Yet, beyond the technical issues, the way humans react to these technologies can make or break any particular application.

Behavior Change

Prof. Daniel Fernandes

Behavior Change is arguably one of the key challenges of energizing behavioral science and researchers in recent years. We know a lot about the biases and mistakes that managers and consumers make. But we know very little about how to correct those mistakes permanently. It is relatively easy to momentarily affect someone’s actions, behaviors or the attitudes. But enduring change is rare.  Habits are learned associations between responses and features of the context in which a desired action should be performed. Features of the environment activate a certain behavioral response. Therefore, it is important to know how people can prepare for action in advance and/or learn to habitually activate a certain behavioral response.

Brand Image & Equity: From Creation to Impact

Prof. Paulo Romeiro

In this seminar, one can study the Image and Equity of Brands, Corporations, Countries, Professions, Institutions, Celebrities, etc., but also co-branding and Brand Endorsement strategies. In addition, you can study the creation of a new Image/ Equity or to results of a change in an existing one. Image can be defined as 'the sum of beliefs, attitudes, and impressions that a person or group of persons has of an object' (Barich & Kotler, 1991). Thus, it has a significant role in how we make our choices and decisions and has a cognitive and an affective factor. The image then builds Equity. Keller (1993) wrote of two stages of equity development, labeled "awareness level" and "image level", that stem from consumers' needs and wants and lead to a brand.

Business Adaptive Strategies in Crisis

Prof. Ricardo Reis; Prof. Nuno Cardeal

During moments of severe economic or social crisis many companies have to adapt significantly to new markets and different operational conditions. The adaptive exercise of these venture is one of the most demanding strategic creative endeavors a manager has to embark in. Many are successful and striving businesses emerge from these processes. We want to take advantage of the current massive economic crisis and discover examples of firms, industries, products, services, institutions that changed their strategies adapting to this new reality. We are not limiting the scope to local companies, though Portuguese companies were subjected to intense economic crises within the last decade, which makes the country a particularly interesting laboratory to study this topic.

Consulting for Startups

Prof. Rute Xavier

This course is an opportunity to make a difference in the early stages of a startup’s life. Students will be challenged to cover a 360º view of a new business or a business idea to be set up.  Projects are identified by the seminar instructors and offered to students – it is not mandatory to have a previous idea to deploy the dissertation. 

Consulting Project

Prof. Rute Xavier 

This course aims to help students write their Master's thesis supported on a consulting project in a real word corporation they are proposed to develop and deploy during the semester. Consulting projects are arranged by the seminar instructor. It is adequate for Strategy and Entrepreneurship and Marketing students. It comprises a group of mandatory sessions that will help guide students in their consulting project and it will provide an overview of research methodologies, offering students the main skills to write up their thesis. Groups of two students work together on a given Consulting Project for the whole duration of the workshop, in direct contact with the client organization and pursuing their own project. However, each student needs to make an individual problem statement, literature review, and write an individual master thesis. Students are advised to do this dissertation as a full-time job. It is possible that students may spend 1 or 2 days a week working on the client site.

Decision Making 

Prof. Cristina Mendonça; Prof. Filipa Almeida 

Every day we make decisions, yet we typically do not think or reflect much about them. If we were to scrutinize every single decision we make, we would make little else. Thus, some decisions are best left unscrutinised and just made quickly. However, everyone agrees that important decisions should be pondered upon and slow. This duality, according to Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist and Nobel laureate in economics, is at the core of decision making. This duality, according to many is both efficient and error prone and is at the core of most of our irrationality. In this seminar we will study how  one makes decisions in a domain of your interest and/or how to improve them.

Fashion, Sustainability and Purpose - A Consumer Perspective

Prof. Vera Colaço

International pressure from organizations such as the UN, policymakers, and activists are leading many fashion companies to move from traditional CSR strategies and actions to incorporate sustainable business operations (including the value chain ) that have a purpose. These companies and associated brands are encouraged to have more sustainable businesses and follow the UN 2030 Agenda led by 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)1. For example, brands such as Patagonia are moving some of their traditional business operations such as clothing production to the repair of clothes to increase its lifecycle following SDG 12. Fast fashion brands, such as H&M are also ethically sourcing some of their collections as a response to the increasing green consumerism trend that comes down from high-end designers such as Stella McCartney. The democratization of eco-materials such organic cotton, mushroom-based fabrics, circular business models that involve upcycling and waste management, or more socially-inclusive business policies are some of the purpose-oriented measures communicated by brands to elicit sales and improve consumer perceptions.
But are consumers aware of such developments? Are consumers willing to purchase from companies and brands that have a sustainable and purpose-driven orientation?

Healthcare: Innovation and Transformation

Prof. Henrique Martins

Healthcare already needed change, due to high pressure of aging and raising costs. After COVID-19 change is unavoidable. The question that remains is: WHY SHOULD YOU PARTICIPATE? Digital Healthcare Systems concept is that of rethinking healthcare as digital first. It means significant innovation is needed and healthcare transformation. The HIT Seminar and the thesis will revolve around this new concept.

Preventive, paperless, empowering, personalized, and accountable. Digital healthcare strengths lay not in technology but rather that digital technology will be present in processes, professionals and people, in ways such that everyone can be a healthcare creator. 

Healthy and Sustainable Food Systems: Consumer and Industry Perspectives

Prof. Ana Isabel Costa

Consumers rightfully aspire that companies do their share towards securing a more sustainable, safer and fairer future to humankind, partly by supporting their own efforts to adopt more sustainable food consumption behaviors. These often transcend the mere purchase or use of new products and services, however, and frequently imply profound changes in mindset and lifestyle that are hard to achieve and maintain. Together with the lack of honest, clear, positive and reliable information about what constitutes sustainable food consumption, what trade-offs it implies in different dimensions of sustainability (climate, resources, populations, economies, ways of life) and what will be its true impact, this creates a huge misalignment between consumers’ beliefs and expectations about companies’ (and own) sustainability efforts, what these efforts really are, and, importantly, what they should be.

Internationalization: Small and Medium Businesses

Prof. Ricardo Reis; Prof. Nuno Cardeal 

The seminar aims at developing master theses focused on the study of the internationalization of small and medium companies in certain industries relevant in the Portuguese economy. We want to study what specific industries can do better to promote themselves abroad. Every edition we suggested two or more industries to be analyzed, as an example (but not one you need to choose), we describe reasons to analyze the Wine Industry.

Marketing and Hedonic Experiences

Prof. João Niza Braga 

This seminar examines research on how consumers represent their hedonic experiences and how these representations guide consumer decisions and social interactions in the marketplace, but also in organizational contexts. Finally, we explore how this research can build insights for marketers or managers.

New Product Innovation

Prof. Miguel Rita

Either being an entrepreneur or working in the marketing department of a company, product or service innovation plays a pivotal role in your success. Behind each product or service launch, there is a number of decisions to be made - from developing the initial insight, to formulating alternative paths and marketing mixes, until the culmination of the process – the launch itself.  These decisions are largely unseen by the final consumer, but they remain a fundamental part of the value creation process in modern marketing.

Product Management in Consumer Packaged Goods

Prof. Paulo Romeiro 

Brand or Product Management is a crucial part of the marketing function in many Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) Companies, having direct contact with advertising, promotion, and sales. These companies are selling more variations of products in more places to more types of customers against more competitors. Therefore, they are getting increasingly complex, and this compromise overall effectiveness and results. This seminar aims to help students prepare their MSc Dissertation in the area of CPG Brand or Product Management, with a focus on the effectiveness of promotions, packaging, and point of sale communications.

Responsible Business

Prof. Nuno Moreira da Cruz 

The need to act as Responsible Business (RB) is now a key element of most strategic agendas of Corporations and has now passed a point of no-return.  RB is certainly not a Fad, but an unstoppable Macro Trend and Corporations can no longer avoid the fact that their actions (and omissions) will have a scrutinized impact in markets where they operate, and relevant stakeholders will hold them responsible for it. Factors like globalization, communication technology, rising awareness of consumers, citizens, local communities, high profile breaches of Corporate Ethics, have all led to a place where leaders can no longer act without taking in consideration an holistic approach to Responsible Business (that includes economic, environmental and social sustainability). In the future, companies’ success will depend on the ability to deal with these issues, and profitability will only be consistently achieved when demands of key Stakeholders are more balanced. A new source of competitive advantage is on the rise. 

Social Responsibility and Perceived Trust: Companies, Consumers and Stakeholders

Prof. Sérgio Moreira

Contemporary society have become more and more aware that purchasable goods have inherent social value – Are the company workers provided with good working and salary conditions? Are provided the goods environmentally sustainable? Are companies compensating any negative impacts of operation in local communities? These are some of the questions that social groups, from governments to consumers, have been recurrently asking and that, consequently, companies have been effortfully working to address. It is assumed that these social responsibility practices will be well received by consumers, improving brand trust, perceived fairness, brand attitudes and, ultimately, consumption behaviors. But is it actually the case? Does Social Responsibility work in the benefit of companies, consumers and stakeholders, or it wishful thinking?

Tourism Marketing

Prof. Helena Rodrigues 

Every industry faces new trends and challenges! The tourism industry is no exception as coronavirus infections continue to rise all over the world, countries also face serious threats for their visitors. New trends in tourism appear and are taking hold since the beginning of this new decade. Changing demographics, advances in technology, closed borders, grounded airplanes and shifting social mores. These influences give rise to important new tourism trends and this seminar aims to find new tourism trends to watch.    

Well-being: innovation and impact on personal choice

Prof. João Niza Braga; Prof. Sofia Jacinto

This seminar will thus study the processes underlying consumers’ judgements and decisions about health and well-being related products and services in different social and health contexts. This seminar will put a particular emphasis on how these decisions are impacted by technological advances and medical innovation as well as by consumers’ and companies’ growing concerns with the ethical and sustainable aspects of the well-being and health industries.

 

Content Published - November, 08th 2023; Syllabus Published - TBD

Open to students from the M.Sc. in Business, International M.Sc. in Management (all Specializations), and M.Sc. in Management (both specializations).

 

Applied Research Topics on Strategy

Prof. Pedro Parada

The Dissertation Seminar on research topics in Strategy Builds-up on the papers written by the faculty of the seminar around key areas in strategy, mostly Corporate Strategy, international expansion and global management, and strategic change. The basic bibliography and references are the practice-oriented publication of the faculty with complementary readings. Depending on the topic selected by students they will receive further references and recommendations.

Automation and The Future Workplace

Prof. Filipa de Almeida e Prof. Cristina Mendonça

What we do for a living, « work » has long been a central theme in our lives. « Work » is important not only as it brings us the financial means to live but also as it can be a great source of meaning, contributing strongly to our identity, to being who we are. « Work » has been a changing idea reflecting its different realities over time. Right now, however, « work » is being disrupted as arguably, never before. AI and other technological advances (e.g., socially assistive robots, AI-based decision support systems, ...) promise to disrupt every aspect of human life, from the domestic sphere to organizations, to global markets. Yet, beyond the technical issues, the way humans react to these technologies can make or break any particular application.

Business Adaptive Strategies in Crisis

Prof. Ricardo Reis; Prof. Nuno Cardeal

During moments of severe economic or social crisis many companies have to adapt significantly to new markets and different operational conditions. The adaptive exercise of these venture is one of the most demanding strategic creative endeavors a manager has to embark in. Many are successful and striving businesses emerge from these processes. We want to take advantage of the current massive economic crisis and discover examples of firms, industries, products, services, institutions that changed their strategies adapting to this new reality. We are not limiting the scope to local companies, though Portuguese companies were subjected to intense economic crises within the last decade, which makes the country a particularly interesting laboratory to study this topic.

Business Strategy Case Studies

Prof. Nuno Guedes 

This workshop aims to help students to write their thesis around the development of a teaching case on business strategy. The emphasis of this workshop will be on implementation issues of strategic concepts. Students will be encouraged to explore situations in which companies have faced operational problems and dilemmas resulting from strategic decisions.

Competitive Advantage

Prof. Peter Rajsingh  

This Seminar engages with a fundamental notion in business and strategy – competitive advantage (CA). Students will define a topic in some domain and drill down to discover drivers of competitive positioning, their nature, and durability. This plays out against the background of Schumpeter’s insight that “creative destruction” is the major dynamic defining competitive capitalism. 

Consulting for Startups

Prof. Rute Xavier

This course is an opportunity to make a difference in the early stages of a startup’s life. Students will be challenged to cover a 360º view of a new business or a business idea to be set up.  Projects are identified by the seminar instructors and offered to students – it is not mandatory to have a previous idea to deploy the dissertation. 

Consulting Project

Prof. Rute Xavier 

This course aims to help students write their Master's thesis supported on a consulting project in a real word corporation they are proposed to develop and deploy during the semester. Consulting projects are arranged by the seminar instructor. It is adequate for Strategy and Entrepreneurship and Marketing students. It comprises a group of mandatory sessions that will help guide students in their consulting project and it will provide an overview of research methodologies, offering students the main skills to write up their thesis. Groups of two students work together on a given Consulting Project for the whole duration of the workshop, in direct contact with the client organization and pursuing their own project. However, each student needs to make an individual problem statement, literature review, and write an individual master thesis. Students are advised to do this dissertation as a full-time job. It is possible that students may spend 1 or 2 days a week working on the client site.

Decision Making 

Prof. Cristina Mendonça; Prof. Filipa Almeida 

Every day we make decisions, yet we typically do not think or reflect much about them. If we were to scrutinize every single decision we make, we would make little else. Thus, some decisions are best left unscrutinised and just made quickly. However, everyone agrees that important decisions should be pondered upon and slow. This duality, according to Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist and Nobel laureate in economics, is at the core of decision making. This duality, according to many is both efficient and error prone and is at the core of most of our irrationality. In this seminar we will study how  one makes decisions in a domain of your interest and/or how to improve them.

Digital and Sustainable Business Models

Prof. Claudia Antunes Marante; Prof. René Bohnsack

This seminar is suitable for students that would like to write a more academic thesis. Students will work on topics all focusing on the emergence of new business models in the context of digitalization, urban and industrial transformation, and smart cities; Topic 1: Business Models & Digital Transformation; Topic 2: Digital Transformation for Sustainability; Topic 3: How blockchain-based tokenization is revolutionizing future businesses; Topic 4: Business Model Innovation and Competition in Digital Ecosystems.

Fashion, Sustainability and Purpose - A Consumer Perspective

Prof. Vera Colaço

International pressure from organizations such as the UN, policymakers, and activists are leading many fashion companies to move from traditional CSR strategies and actions to incorporate sustainable business operations (including the value chain ) that have a purpose. These companies and associated brands are encouraged to have more sustainable businesses and follow the UN 2030 Agenda led by 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)1. For example, brands such as Patagonia are moving some of their traditional business operations such as clothing production to the repair of clothes to increase its lifecycle following SDG 12. Fast fashion brands, such as H&M are also ethically sourcing some of their collections as a response to the increasing green consumerism trend that comes down from high-end designers such as Stella McCartney. The democratization of eco-materials such organic cotton, mushroom-based fabrics, circular business models that involve upcycling and waste management, or more socially-inclusive business policies are some of the purpose-oriented measures communicated by brands to elicit sales and improve consumer perceptions.
But are consumers aware of such developments? Are consumers willing to purchase from companies and brands that have a sustainable and purpose-driven orientation?

Foresight & Strategic Planning 

Prof. Duarte Ferreira

Develop Strategic Planning skills for projects or businesses endeavors, to think and act in times of uncertainty and exponential change by learning how to build and explore scenarios for the future. Understand the value and impact of strategic planning and how to use it to build competitive advantage.

Healthcare: Innovation and Transformation

Prof. Henrique Martins

Healthcare already needed change, due to high pressure of aging and raising costs. After COVID-19 change is unavoidable. The question that remains is: WHY SHOULD YOU PARTICIPATE? Digital Healthcare Systems concept is that of rethinking healthcare as digital first. It means significant innovation is needed and healthcare transformation. The HIT Seminar and the thesis will revolve around this new concept.

Preventive, paperless, empowering, personalized, and accountable. Digital healthcare strengths lay not in technology but rather that digital technology will be present in processes, professionals and people, in ways such that everyone can be a healthcare creator. 

Internationalization: Small and Medium Businesses

Prof. Ricardo Reis; Prof. Nuno Cardeal 

The seminar aims at developing master theses focused on the study of the internationalization of small and medium companies in certain industries relevant in the Portuguese economy. We want to study what specific industries can do better to promote themselves abroad. Every edition we suggested two or more industries to be analyzed, as an example (but not one you need to choose), we describe reasons to analyze the Wine Industry.

New Business Opportunities

Prof. Rute Xavier 

This seminar aims to help students developing their own concrete business idea. It is adequate for students who have a business idea and want to launch it. It is mandatory students have a concrete idea for a business venture, and it is supposed they are advanced in their thinking development before starting the seminar.

New Frontiers in Strategic Thinking

Prof. Filipa Lancastre

The first two decades of 21st century witnessed tremendous changes in the corporate environment and in the way businesses are managed. The new era is challenging classic strategic thinking based on traditional models of standardization, specialization, hierarchy, and so on. Three key drivers are disrupting conventional models and shaping how companies think about strategy. These forces call for unconventional approaches to competitive advantage, uncertainty management, and new strategic thinking. In this seminar, we investigate how modern organizations are strategizing to address the XXI century challenges.

New Product Innovation

Prof. Miguel Rita

Either being an entrepreneur or working in the marketing department of a company, product or service innovation plays a pivotal role in your success. Behind each product or service launch, there is a number of decisions to be made - from developing the initial insight, to formulating alternative paths and marketing mixes, until the culmination of the process – the launch itself.  These decisions are largely unseen by the final consumer, but they remain a fundamental part of the value creation process in modern marketing.

Responsible Business

Prof. Nuno Moreira da Cruz 

The need to act as Responsible Business (RB) is now a key element of most strategic agendas of Corporations and has now passed a point of no-return.  RB is certainly not a Fad, but an unstoppable Macro Trend and Corporations can no longer avoid the fact that their actions (and omissions) will have a scrutinized impact in markets where they operate, and relevant stakeholders will hold them responsible for it. Factors like globalization, communication technology, rising awareness of consumers, citizens, local communities, high profile breaches of Corporate Ethics, have all led to a place where leaders can no longer act without taking in consideration an holistic approach to Responsible Business (that includes economic, environmental and social sustainability). In the future, companies’ success will depend on the ability to deal with these issues, and profitability will only be consistently achieved when demands of key Stakeholders are more balanced. A new source of competitive advantage is on the rise. 

Social Responsibility and Perceived Trust: Companies, Consumers and Stakeholders

Prof. Sérgio Moreira

Contemporary society have become more and more aware that purchasable goods have inherent social value – Are the company workers provided with good working and salary conditions? Are provided the goods environmentally sustainable? Are companies compensating any negative impacts of operation in local communities? These are some of the questions that social groups, from governments to consumers, have been recurrently asking and that, consequently, companies have been effortfully working to address. It is assumed that these social responsibility practices will be well received by consumers, improving brand trust, perceived fairness, brand attitudes and, ultimately, consumption behaviors. But is it actually the case? Does Social Responsibility work in the benefit of companies, consumers and stakeholders, or it wishful thinking?

The Future of Industries

Prof. Peter Rajsingh

This seminar is ideal for those wishing to develop the capacity to identify disruptors, assess their impact on business models and stakeholders, and postulate how an industry will be reshaped as a result. For instance, strategy students might propose how an industry might be transformed once a new player takes the lead in the industry; entrepreneurship students might propose how a new player will displace incumbent companies; finance students might locate a new domain for generating alpha in an emerging asset class.

 

 

 

Open to students from the M.Sc. in Business Analytics.

 

Conduct Your Own End to End Analytics Project

Prof. Nicolò Bertani

The goal of analytics is to leverage data to answer meaningful questions. During your masters, you have acquired the theoretical and technical skills to gather, organize, and model data. Further, you have learnt how to analyze, compare, and interpret the output of these models, to make a prediction or a decision. 

This dissertation seminar wants to be an opportunity for you to further sharpen the full spectrum of the competences and skills you have acquired. You will sharpen them by autonomously developing an end-to-end analytics project. You will identify a research question of your interest (a prediction or a decision problem, business or not) and build a complete analytics workflow to reach a data-driven answer. 

Using Interpretability and Explainability in Machine Learning as a tool for Decision Making 

Prof. Ana Guedes

In the context of machine learning and artificial intelligence, explainability (xAI) and interpretability are often used interchangeably. However, interpretability is usually focused on being able to discern the mechanics without necessarily knowing why, while explainability if focused on explaining what is happening in human terms. A related area of research is Causal Inference, which focus on extracting causal relationships from data, whereas interpretable AI is concerned with describing general relationships between data and not with distinguishing causal from non causal effects.

These areas are concerned with enhancing trustworthiness and accountability of predictive models. This is driven both by legislation, such as the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and by the need to better understand the system being investigated and to understand the reason why a model might fail or to ensure fairness of predictions.

Conventionally, there are 2 different types of approaches: one focused on creating interpretable models in the first place (such as rule-based algorithms), the other focused on proposing ways of extracting insight from already trained black-box models by the use of local or global explanations (using approaches such as LIME or SHAP). 

Rather than focusing solely on performance, xAI aims to explain how specific decisions or recommendations are reached. The main advantages reside in the improved explainability and transparency, faster adoption by the business, faster debugging by developers and enabling of auditing for regulatory requirements. Reported use cases range from customer retention to claims management, insurance pricing, banking, marketing, fraud detection or healthcare and life sciences. 

Disruptive Forecasting and Business Analytics

Prof. Pedro Fernandes

This seminar is oriented towards creative and open-minded students from the MSc in Business Analytics that aim to develop an original research (dissertation) in unconventional, or even exotic topics concerned with forecasting, predictive analytics and other relevant areas.

If you have an original, or even «strange» research idea, or a new algorithm, application or product with a high disruptive potential, this is the right place for you. The main goal is to promote a start-up and collaborative culture among the seminar’s participants that could result in real original researches or even new businesses. If you dream to create your own start-up company, this is the seminar for you and for your potential co-founders from CLSBE.

With this general framework in mind, each student should define, right from the first seminar’s session, a relevant and focused research question that should avoid, cautiously, wide-range themes or topics, noting that Machine Learning (ML) / Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a complex and heterogeneous field with a lot of scientific production. Thus, each student should proceed a solid research work, focused on pertinent problems or questions, methods and original applications with high-potential impact and value-added.

The aim of this seminar is to facilitate, in an interactive and brainstorming fashion, the path of each student towards her/his own research, as well as the team’s interdisciplinary interaction and mutual learning, always having in mind that innovation, namely, in advanced analytics loves disruption, interaction and R&D of new approaches, methods and algorithms.

In order to facilitate the dissertations’ development, some examples of research themes, questions and methods will be provided. Students could adopt, recycle or adapt them for their own works. The topics to be covered are, namely, the following:

Forecasting with robust filters;
Forecasting at scale, namely, with Facebook’s Prophet or UBER’s Theta method;
Forecasting with reinforcement learning (RL);
Forecasting with regression trees (RT);
Forecasting and data analysis with Microsoft Power BI;
Innovative methods to combine forecasts;
Natural language processing (NLP): intelligent reasoning versus text as data;
Analysis of urban networks using social media data.

Business Analytics and Data Science for Climate Risk Management

Prof. Miguel Nogueira

The seminar series aims to provide the new generation of business professionals and analysts with the necessary tools and knowledge to navigate the complex landscape of climate change and its impact on business operations. By integrating business analytics, data science, and machine learning with climate risk assessment, participants will be equipped to identify, quantify, and to make data-driven decisions for climate risk management. Throughout the seminar series, participants will have the opportunity to deepen their understanding of how business analytics contributes to effective climate risk management across diverse industries (e.g. energy, insurance, agriculture, industry, real estate, etc.). They will explore both the theory and practice of utilizing business analytics to address climate-related risks, while engaging in in-depth discussions and analyzing real-world case studies.

Driving Growth Through Algorithmic Marketing

Prof. Nuno Paiva

In today's era of algorithmic marketing, a new paradigm has emerged. Algorithmic marketing can be defined as a data-driven approach that leverages automated decision-making systems, AI, and ML to enhance marketing strategies. While the artistic approach of the past is no longer the sole driving force, human expertise and creativity continue to play a crucial role alongside these technologies. Rather than replacing human input, algorithmic marketing empowers marketers with powerful tools to optimize their campaigns.

The advent of digitalization has acted as a catalyst, enabling the collection of vast amounts of data, and providing opportunities to reach consumers through one-to-one mediums. Through digital channels and platforms, marketers can gather valuable insights into consumer behaviour, preferences, and interactions. This wealth of data, combined with AI and ML algorithms, allows for highly targeted and personalized marketing efforts.

Human marketers play a vital role in algorithmic marketing by leveraging the insights provided by AI and ML algorithms. They make informed decisions, interpret data, and add strategic value to the process. Human creativity, context, and intuition complement the algorithmic systems, resulting in more effective and impactful marketing strategies. The relationship between humans and algorithmic marketing is one of synergy, where the combination of human expertise, digital data, and AI-driven analysis enables businesses to reach the right audience at the right time with the right message. This ultimately leads to enhanced customer experiences and improved return on investment (ROI).

Exploring Machine Learning approaches to handle reject inference for model retaining

Prof. Susana Brandão

A frequent real-life scenario for a data scientist in services or industry, e.g., banking or telco, is that the data we have available to train models does not represent the natural outcome of clients’ decisions or actions. Instead, the data is affected by current policies or campaigns defined by the company. E.g., imagine we are data scientists at a bank where there is already a model for predicting whether a given client will default on their credit. Based on the model, the bank has policies that automatically decline some applications. If we need to retrain the model – a common task in the industry when new data sources become available or when the current business conditions are very different from those when the model was last trained – we do not know the labels of the rejected population. If the bank rejected subject A credit application, we will never know if A would default or not. This uncertainty in the outcome brings two problems. 1) we cannot use the rejected population in the training of the new model, and 2) we cannot predict the performance of the new model before putting it in production. 

 

 

Content Published - May, 22nd 2023; Syllabus (draft version) Published - May, 23rd 2023; Updated July, 21st 2023.

Open to students from the M.Sc. in Economics (all Specializations).

 

Applied Economics 

Prof. Hugo Reis

The objective of this course is to show how microdata combined with quantitative methods can be used to look at inequality to answer long-standing questions in economics and improve public policies.

 

 

Content Published - May, 22nd 2023; Syllabus (draft version) Published - May, 23rd 2023

Open to students from M.Sc. in Finance, International M.Sc. in Finance, M.Sc. in Economics (Specialization in Finance & Banking), and International M.Sc. in Management (Specialization in Corporate Finance).

 

Asset Allocation

Prof. Pedro Barroso 

The seminar is focused on topics related to asset allocation/portfolio management. This includes how to design portfolios that meet expectations, assessing and managing the risk of portfolios and factor investments, estimating optimization inputs, and managing portfolios with currency market exposures. It also considers well-known investment strategies with implications for the portfolio construction process such as momentum, risk parity or volatility timing.

Empirical Corporate Finance

Prof. Diana Bonfim 

The theoretical and empirical literature on corporate finance is wide and ever-growing. Classical capital structure decisions continue to be revisited, and new questions are emerging permanently.  In this workshop we will review the recent literature on empirical corporate finance, focusing on the new challenges faced by researchers in this domain.

Equity Valuation

Prof. José Tudela Martins 

This workshop aims to provide an overview of equity valuation methodologies, offering a set of skills that will allow students to work in the “investment advising” community.

Financial Analysis of Corporate Events

Prof. Geraldo Cerqueiro

This dissertation seminar offers participants an opportunity to select particular events and to study their financial impact on a company or on a set of companies using event study methodology. An event study attempts to measure the valuation effects of a corporate event by examining the response of the stock price around the announcement of the event. Examples of events that can be analyzed are corporate scandals, merger and acquisitions, earnings announcements, and regulatory changes.

Financial Distress

Prof. Ricardo Reis

This seminar is about understanding how firms and managers deal with extreme financial problems. The recent financial crisis together turns Portugal into an interesting laboratory on this particular topic. Many companies experienced an exogenous shock that lead them to close down or restructure quickly. We are now recovering from these years, and this turns the current date the ideal timing to analyze and study financial distress.

 

Machine Learning in Quantitative Finance

Prof. Dan Tran

Machine Learning (ML) is a powerful toolbox that combines the strength of data science and computational methods. ML techniques are particularly useful in finance, where practitioners have to consistently deal with large, high-dimensional datasets and non-linear patterns. Applied correctly, ML algorithms often outperform standard statistical methods in both predictive power and efficiency. However, financial data exhibit a low signal-to-noise ratio, making the application of ML not straightforward.

 

Structural Models of Contingent Claims Pricing and Credit Risk

Prof. Nuno Silva 

In finance, a security is considered to be a contingent claim whenever its value depends on the value of some underlying. The prototypical contingent claim example is a stock option. However, there are several other financial assets that can be modelled as contingent claims. For instance, in their seminal articles, Black and Scholes (1973) and Merton (1974) treat equity as a contingent claim on the firm assets (a call option). Bonds, credit default swaps and contingent capital are also examples of securities that can be modelled as contingent claims. This seminar will start by reviewing the basics of option pricing theory. The most relevant articles will be reviewed covering applications of structural models to asset pricing, credit risk and corporate finance.

 

Sustainable Finance

Prof. Zöe Venter

Both financial and economic decisions worldwide have become increasingly influenced by the scarcity of resources, the search for profits through efficiency, and the ongoing climate change battle. As such, the move to a sustainable financial system has emerged as one of the main challenges of the present generation. Sustainable finance is the process whereby we take into account environmental, social and governance considerations when making financial investment decisions. This should lead to more long-term investments in sustainable activities and projects. This seminar offers participants the opportunity study the impact that sustainable practices have on a number of factors such as bank loan costs, stock returns and profitability. Participants will also have the opportunity to look at the impact that the increased climate change awareness has on stock markets.

Venture Capital Investments

Prof. Fatima Shuwaikh 

One external means for equity financing, economic growth, and innovation are venture capital investments, which have become highly influential in the funding of entrepreneurial companies. To back their growth, entrepreneurial companies have commonly directed to venture capitalists, who often provide expertise in setting new ventures into successes, good hands-on help, and money. This seminar outlines the concept of corporate venture capital (CVC) from two main aspects: the perspective of entrepreneurial companies and the perspective of established firms (investors), focusing on the investment-related issues in the CVC program. 

 

 

Content Published - May, 3rd 2023; Syllabus (draft version) Published - May, 5th 2023

Open to students from the M.Sc. in Business, International M.Sc. in Management (all Specializations), and M.Sc. in Management (both specializations).

 

Applied  Research Topics on Strategy

Prof. Pedro Parada

The Dissertation Seminar on research topics in Strategy Builds-up on the papers written by the faculty of the seminar around key areas in strategy, mostly Corporate Strategy, international expansion and global management, and strategic change. The basic bibliography and references are the practice-oriented publication of the faculty with complementary readings. Depending on the topic selected by students they will receive further references and recommendations.

The Dissertation seminar requires students to skim through the references and choose a topic of interest. 

Automation and The Future Workplace

Prof. Filipa de Almeida e Prof. Cristina Mendonça

What we do for a living, « work » has long been a central theme in our lives. « Work » is important not only as it brings us the financial means to live but also as it can be a great source of meaning, contributing strongly to our identity, to being who we are. « Work » has been a changing idea reflecting its different realities over time. Right now, however, « work » is being disrupted as arguably, never before. AI and other technological advances (e.g., socially assistive robots, AI-based decision support systems, ...) promise to disrupt every aspect of human life, from the domestic sphere to organizations, to global markets. Yet, beyond the technical issues, the way humans react to these technologies can make or break any particular application.

Behavior Change

Prof. Daniel Fernandes

Behavior Change is arguably one of the key challenges of energizing behavioral science and researchers in recent years. We know a lot about the biases and mistakes that managers and consumers make. But we know very little about how to correct those mistakes permanently. It is relatively easy to momentarily affect someone’s actions, behaviors or the attitudes. But enduring change is rare.  Habits are learned associations between responses and features of the context in which a desired action should be performed. Features of the environment activate a certain behavioral response. Therefore, it is important to know how people can prepare for action in advance and/or learn to habitually activate a certain behavioral response.

Brand Image & Equity: From Creation to Impact

Prof. Paulo Romeiro

In this seminar, one can study the Image and Equity of Brands, Corporations, Countries, Professions, Institutions, Celebrities, etc., but also co-branding and Brand Endorsement strategies. In addition, you can study the creation of a new Image/ Equity or to results of a change in an existing one. Image can be defined as 'the sum of beliefs, attitudes, and impressions that a person or group of persons has of an object' (Barich & Kotler, 1991). Thus, it has a significant role in how we make our choices and decisions and has a cognitive and an affective factor. The image then builds Equity. Keller (1993) wrote of two stages of equity development, labeled "awareness level" and "image level", that stem from consumers' needs and wants and lead to a brand.

Brand Value Creation

Prof. Pedro Tavares 

In a world characterised by the stress of everyday life, the speed with which everything happens, the constant change in motivations, habits, attitudes and behaviors, the competitiveness of financial and human resources, instability and uncertainty, and the permanent demand with success, brands are the main asset of organisations. Brands are assumed as the most relevant and valuable asset in organisations, as they are the main guarantee of trust, recognition of quality and also the most expressive symbol of purchase and consumption decisions of products and services.Brand value management is exposed to different stakeholders and as such within organisations everyone has to be part of an ecosystem and a multidisciplinary and integrated process of creating, building and managing the strength and economic value of brands.

Building Sustainable Organizations – Strategy, Entrepreneurship and Marketing

Prof. Marta Bicho

Sustainable and Purposeful organizations are growing rapidly. These organizations have a dual mission integrated in their purpose, and offer goods and services focused on health, the environment, social justice, and sustainable living. Some of the challenges these enterprises face are the limbo between institutional and societal pressures, and also social and financial goals, which  might not be completely clear to and understood by society. Additionally, sustainable and purposeful organizations face higher skepticism from various stakeholders due to their dual identity and category cross-over. Moreover, the pandemic situation we lived, led organizations to re-think their purpose and align their business with sustainable practices, as well as, with external needs. For sustainable organizations to be successful, it is important to understand what are the relevant strategies and marketing responses at their disposal to be effective in the marketplace. It is also relevant to address what stakeholders think regarding sustainable organizations. Thus, what is the current state of enterprises with sustainable motives? What can we expect in the future from these organizations and their leaders? This seminar intends to cover topics related to building and developing sustainable organizations. 

Business Adaptive Strategies in Crisis

Prof. Ricardo Reis; Prof. Nuno Cardeal

During moments of severe economic or social crisis many companies have to adapt significantly to new markets and different operational conditions. The adaptive exercise of these venture is one of the most demanding strategic creative endeavors a manager has to embark in. Many are successful and striving businesses emerge from these processes. We want to take advantage of the current massive economic crisis and discover examples of firms, industries, products, services, institutions that changed their strategies adapting to this new reality. We are not limiting the scope to local companies, though Portuguese companies were subjected to intense economic crises within the last decade, which makes the country a particularly interesting laboratory to study this topic.

Business Strategy Case Studies

Prof. Nuno Guedes 

This workshop aims to help students to write their thesis around the development of a teaching case on business strategy. The emphasis of this workshop will be on implementation issues of strategic concepts. Students will be encouraged to explore situations in which companies have faced operational problems and dilemmas resulting from strategic decisions.

Competitive Advantage

Prof. Peter Rajsingh  

This Seminar engages with a fundamental notion in business and strategy – competitive advantage (CA). Students will define a topic in some domain and drill down to discover drivers of competitive positioning, their nature, and durability. This plays out against the background of Schumpeter’s insight that “creative destruction” is the major dynamic defining competitive capitalism. 

Consulting for Startups

Prof. Rute Xavier

This course is an opportunity to make a difference in the early stages of a startup’s life. Students will be challenged to cover a 360º view of a new business or a business idea to be set up.  Projects are identified by the seminar instructors and offered to students – it is not mandatory to have a previous idea to deploy the dissertation. 

Consulting Project

Prof. Rute Xavier 

This course aims to help students write their Master's thesis supported on a consulting project in a real word corporation they are proposed to develop and deploy during the semester. Consulting projects are arranged by the seminar instructor. It is adequate for Strategy and Entrepreneurship and Marketing students. It comprises a group of mandatory sessions that will help guide students in their consulting project and it will provide an overview of research methodologies, offering students the main skills to write up their thesis. Groups of two students work together on a given Consulting Project for the whole duration of the workshop, in direct contact with the client organization and pursuing their own project. However, each student needs to make an individual problem statement, literature review, and write an individual master thesis. Students are advised to do this dissertation as a full-time job. It is possible that students may spend 1 or 2 days a week working on the client site.

Consumer Adoption of Innovations

Prof. Mónica Borges 

When thinking of innovations, one may immediately think of new technologies and disruptive products. Yet, an innovation may be any new idea, behavior or product/service that is different from what existed or was done previously. Companies want to launch products that are successful in the marketplace. New products should not be launched blindly in the market, only because some marketer somewhere thought that the product is required. Hence, marketers need to understand how and why, as well as to what extent, a new product, idea or behavior is adopted by individuals or organizations. The most successful adoption of an innovation results from understanding the target consumers and the factors that influence their buying or use behavior. 

Decision Making 

Prof. Cristina Mendonça; Prof. Filipa Almeida 

Every day we make decisions, yet we typically do not think or reflect much about them. If we were to scrutinize every single decision we make, we would make little else. Thus, some decisions are best left unscrutinised and just made quickly. However, everyone agrees that important decisions should be pondered upon and slow. This duality, according to Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist and Nobel laureate in economics, is at the core of decision making. This duality, according to many is both efficient and error prone and is at the core of most of our irrationality. In this seminar we will study how  one makes decisions in a domain of your interest and/or how to improve them.

Fashion, Sustainability and Purpose - A Consumer Perspective

Prof. Vera Colaço

International pressure from organizations such as the UN, policymakers, and activists are leading many fashion companies to move from traditional CSR strategies and actions to incorporate sustainable business operations (including the value chain ) that have a purpose. These companies and associated brands are encouraged to have more sustainable businesses and follow the UN 2030 Agenda led by 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)1. For example, brands such as Patagonia are moving some of their traditional business operations such as clothing production to the repair of clothes to increase its lifecycle following SDG 12. Fast fashion brands, such as H&M are also ethically sourcing some of their collections as a response to the increasing green consumerism trend that comes down from high-end designers such as Stella McCartney. The democratization of eco-materials such organic cotton, mushroom-based fabrics, circular business models that involve upcycling and waste management, or more socially-inclusive business policies are some of the purpose-oriented measures communicated by brands to elicit sales and improve consumer perceptions.
But are consumers aware of such developments? Are consumers willing to purchase from companies and brands that have a sustainable and purpose-driven orientation?

Healthcare: Innovation and Transformation

Prof. Henrique Martins

Healthcare needs to change, and Quality-of-Care needs to be central priority. Not just due to high pressure of aging and raising costs, consequences of the most devastating pandemic ever, but also because citizens and individuals want to engage with health and care differently and demand high-quality services. Such change requires motivated and capacitated managers that can be leaders of healthcare innovation and transformation. The health sector needs new and bright minds that make the right questions, challenge the status quo and launch new ideas and innovation based in science and passion for better care and fostering better healthcare worldwide. This seminar will open your mind for this challenge, allow sharing with others about these changes and allow you to work on a possible personal contribution to better health and care of the future. 

Healthy and Sustainable Food Systems: Consumer and Industry Perspectives

Prof. Ana Costa

Consumers rightfully aspire that companies do their share towards securing a more sustainable, safer and fairer future to humankind, partly by supporting their own efforts to adopt more sustainable food consumption behaviors. These often transcend the mere purchase or use of new products and services, however, and frequently imply profound changes in mindset and lifestyle that are hard to achieve and maintain. Together with the lack of honest, clear, positive and reliable information about what constitutes sustainable food consumption, what trade-offs it implies in different dimensions of sustainability (climate, resources, populations, economies, ways of life) and what will be its true impact, this creates a huge misalignment between consumers’ beliefs and expectations about companies’ (and own) sustainability efforts, what these efforts really are, and, importantly, what they should be.

Internationalization: Small and Medium Businesses

Prof. Ricardo Reis; Prof. Nuno Cardeal 

The seminar aims at developing master theses focused on the study of the internationalization of small and medium companies in certain industries relevant in the Portuguese economy. We want to study what specific industries can do better to promote themselves abroad. Every edition we suggested two or more industries to be analyzed, as an example (but not one you need to choose), we describe reasons to analyze the Wine Industry.

Managing with Purpose

Prof. Andrea Caviccini

What’s the role of business in advancing society? The concept of corporate purpose, although sometimes referred to by different terms, has a longstanding history in management and strategy (Barnard 1938, Follett 1940, Drucker 1954, Selznick 1957). The discussion surrounding corporate purpose has become widespread, with leaders dedicating significant time and attention to its development, expression, and widespread adoption.Corporate purpose is often understood as a company's underlying reason for existence. Recent research is proposing purpose as a key expression of, for example, the meaningfulness of work, as a motivating and guiding force for actions, as a mechanism to foster trust among diverse stakeholders, and as a key in facilitating the ecological transition. All these definitions intersect in significant ways with the concept of strategy.

Marketing and Hedonic Experiences

Prof. João Niza Braga 

This seminar examines research on how consumers represent their hedonic experiences and how these representations guide consumer decisions and social interactions in the marketplace, but also in organizational contexts. Finally, we explore how this research can build insights for marketers or managers.

New challenges in Retailing

Prof. Paula Hortinha

In today's rapidly evolving retail landscape, it is essential for retail businesses to understand and adapt to consumer trends. Consumers have become increasingly demanding, seeking personalized experiences, seamless omnichannel interactions, and sustainable and ethical practices. Therefore, retailers must remain attuned to these shifting consumer expectations and embrace innovative strategies to meet their needs effectively. Moreover, the integration of technology is revolutionizing the retail industry, presenting new challenges and opportunities. Technological advancements like artificial intelligence, machine learning, automation, and data analytics are transforming retail operations, allowing retailers to enhance customer experiences and optimize their overall performance.

If you are passionate about the retail industry and its transformation, our seminar is tailored for you. 

New Product Innovation

Prof. Miguel Rita

Either being an entrepreneur or working in the marketing department of a company, product or service innovation plays a pivotal role in your success. Behind each product or service launch, there is a number of decisions to be made - from developing the initial insight, to formulating alternative paths and marketing mixes, until the culmination of the process – the launch itself.  These decisions are largely unseen by the final consumer, but they remain a fundamental part of the value creation process in modern marketing.

Product Management in Consumer Packaged Goods

Prof. Paulo Romeiro 

Brand or Product Management is a crucial part of the marketing function in many Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) Companies, having direct contact with advertising, promotion, and sales. These companies are selling more variations of products in more places to more types of customers against more competitors. Therefore, they are getting increasingly complex, and this compromise overall effectiveness and results. This seminar aims to help students prepare their MSc Dissertation in the area of CPG Brand or Product Management, with a focus on the effectiveness of promotions, packaging, and point of sale communications.

Responsible Business

Prof. Nuno Moreira da Cruz 

The need to act as Responsible Business (RB) is now a key element of most strategic agendas of Corporations and has now passed a point of no-return.  RB is certainly not a Fad, but an unstoppable Macro Trend and Corporations can no longer avoid the fact that their actions (and omissions) will have a scrutinized impact in markets where they operate, and relevant stakeholders will hold them responsible for it. Factors like globalization, communication technology, rising awareness of consumers, citizens, local communities, high profile breaches of Corporate Ethics, have all led to a place where leaders can no longer act without taking in consideration an holistic approach to Responsible Business (that includes economic, environmental and social sustainability). In the future, companies’ success will depend on the ability to deal with these issues, and profitability will only be consistently achieved when demands of key Stakeholders are more balanced. A new source of competitive advantage is on the rise. 

Social Responsibility and Perceived Trust: Companies, Consumers and Stakeholders

Prof. Sérgio Moreira

Contemporary society have become more and more aware that purchasable goods have inherent social value – Are the company workers provided with good working and salary conditions? Are provided the goods environmentally sustainable? Are companies compensating any negative impacts of operation in local communities? These are some of the questions that social groups, from governments to consumers, have been recurrently asking and that, consequently, companies have been effortfully working to address. It is assumed that these social responsibility practices will be well received by consumers, improving brand trust, perceived fairness, brand attitudes and, ultimately, consumption behaviors. But is it actually the case? Does Social Responsibility work in the benefit of companies, consumers and stakeholders, or it wishful thinking?

The Value of Co-Created Products

Prof. Cláudia Costa

In the interest of developing new products that meet customers’ needs in a superior way, companies are increasingly involving consumers in their innovation process. Nike, Lego, Starbucks, BMW have turned to their user base in search of added value. This new value creation has been labeled as co-creation and its benefits have been well established in the literature (Schreier et al., 2012). A more intriguing perspective is to understand how observing consumers (those that buy the product but do not participate in the co-creation process) perceive the outcome of the process (Nishikawa et al., 2017).

Tourism Marketing

Prof. Helena Rodrigues 

Every industry faces new trends and challenges! The tourism industry is no exception as coronavirus infections continue to rise all over the world, countries also face serious threats for their visitors. New trends in tourism appear and are taking hold since the beginning of this new decade. Changing demographics, technological advances, closed borders, grounded airplanes and shifting social mores. These influences give rise to important new tourism trends and this seminar aims to find new tourism trends to watch.    

Virtual Teams: Effectiveness and Productivity

Prof. Ana Paula Giordano

Communication technologies have increased flexibility at work, with the Covid-19 pandemic accelerating this phenomenon. Today, remote work is persevering, and hybrid work is becoming more commonplace. Working virtually creates new opportunities for organizations and workers, but it also creates difficulties for teamwork interdependence and effectiveness. Organizational behavior research has already given us some answers and insight about what conditions might be most fruitful to develop in virtual teams and among team workers, but there are still questions to be uncovered. In this seminar students will be guided to explore research questions related to the management of motivation of team workers in hybrid and virtual teams, and also what team characteristics and practices can help enhance team effectiveness and productivity.

Well-being: innovation and impact on personal choice

Prof. João Niza Braga; Prof. Sofia Jacinto

This seminar will thus study the processes underlying consumers’ judgements and decisions about health and well-being related products and services in different social and health contexts. This seminar will put a particular emphasis on how these decisions are impacted by technological advances and medical innovation as well as by consumers’ and companies’ growing concerns with the ethical and sustainable aspects of the well-being and health industries.

 

 

Content Published - May, 22nd 2023; Syllabus (draft version) Published - May, 23rd 2023; updated July, 21st 2023.

Open to students from the M.Sc. in Business, International M.Sc. in Management (all Specializations), and M.Sc. in Management (both specializations).

 

Applied  Research Topics on Strategy

Prof. Pedro Parada

The Dissertation Seminar on research topics in Strategy Builds-up on the papers written by the faculty of the seminar around key areas in strategy, mostly Corporate Strategy, international expansion and global management, and strategic change. The basic bibliography and references are the practice-oriented publication of the faculty with complementary readings. Depending on the topic selected by students they will receive further references and recommendations.

The Dissertation seminar requires students to skim through the references and choose a topic of interest. 

Assessing Organizational Resilience and its Consequences

Prof. Ekin Ilseven

Unpredictable large-scale systemic adversities are becoming increasingly more diverse and frequent, posing challenges to maintaining the viability of many businesses and organizations. As the effectiveness of traditional risk-management practices against such adversities is limited, building organizational resilience has attracted widespread attention as an alternative. In this seminar, we look at different traditions and perspectives on organizational resilience, how they differ in the ways we can assess them, and what consequences organizational resilience may have for organizational performance, for its members, and the society. Students are encouraged to identify the challenges in implementing resilience-enhancing practices and develop their dissertation on a path towards addressing them.

Automation and The Future Workplace

Prof. Filipa de Almeida e Prof. Cristina Mendonça

What we do for a living, « work » has long been a central theme in our lives. « Work » is important not only as it brings us the financial means to live but also as it can be a great source of meaning, contributing strongly to our identity, to being who we are. « Work » has been a changing idea reflecting its different realities over time. Right now, however, « work » is being disrupted as arguably, never before. AI and other technological advances (e.g., socially assistive robots, AI-based decision support systems, ...) promise to disrupt every aspect of human life, from the domestic sphere to organizations, to global markets. Yet, beyond the technical issues, the way humans react to these technologies can make or break any particular application.

Building Sustainable Organizations – Strategy, Entrepreneurship and Marketing

Prof. Marta Bicho

Sustainable and Purposeful organizations are growing rapidly. These organizations have a dual mission integrated in their purpose, and offer goods and services focused on health, the environment, social justice, and sustainable living. Some of the challenges these enterprises face are the limbo between institutional and societal pressures, and also social and financial goals, which  might not be completely clear to and understood by society. Additionally, sustainable and purposeful organizations face higher skepticism from various stakeholders due to their dual identity and category cross-over. Moreover, the pandemic situation we lived, led organizations to re-think their purpose and align their business with sustainable practices, as well as, with external needs. For sustainable organizations to be successful, it is important to understand what are the relevant strategies and marketing responses at their disposal to be effective in the marketplace. It is also relevant to address what stakeholders think regarding sustainable organizations. Thus, what is the current state of enterprises with sustainable motives? What can we expect in the future from these organizations and their leaders? This seminar intends to cover topics related to building and developing sustainable organizations. 

Business Adaptive Strategies in Crisis

Prof. Ricardo Reis; Prof. Nuno Cardeal

During moments of severe economic or social crisis many companies have to adapt significantly to new markets and different operational conditions. The adaptive exercise of these venture is one of the most demanding strategic creative endeavors a manager has to embark in. Many are successful and striving businesses emerge from these processes. We want to take advantage of the current massive economic crisis and discover examples of firms, industries, products, services, institutions that changed their strategies adapting to this new reality. We are not limiting the scope to local companies, though Portuguese companies were subjected to intense economic crises within the last decade, which makes the country a particularly interesting laboratory to study this topic.

Business Strategy Case Studies

Prof. Nuno Guedes 

This workshop aims to help students to write their thesis around the development of a teaching case on business strategy. The emphasis of this workshop will be on implementation issues of strategic concepts. Students will be encouraged to explore situations in which companies have faced operational problems and dilemmas resulting from strategic decisions.

Competitive Advantage

Prof. Peter Rajsingh  

This Seminar engages with a fundamental notion in business and strategy – competitive advantage (CA). Students will define a topic in some domain and drill down to discover drivers of competitive positioning, their nature, and durability. This plays out against the background of Schumpeter’s insight that “creative destruction” is the major dynamic defining competitive capitalism. 

Consulting for Startups

Prof. Rute Xavier

This course is an opportunity to make a difference in the early stages of a startup’s life. Students will be challenged to cover a 360º view of a new business or a business idea to be set up.  Projects are identified by the seminar instructors and offered to students – it is not mandatory to have a previous idea to deploy the dissertation. 

Consulting Project

Prof. Rute Xavier 

This course aims to help students write their Master's thesis supported on a consulting project in a real word corporation they are proposed to develop and deploy during the semester. Consulting projects are arranged by the seminar instructor. It is adequate for Strategy and Entrepreneurship and Marketing students. It comprises a group of mandatory sessions that will help guide students in their consulting project and it will provide an overview of research methodologies, offering students the main skills to write up their thesis. Groups of two students work together on a given Consulting Project for the whole duration of the workshop, in direct contact with the client organization and pursuing their own project. However, each student needs to make an individual problem statement, literature review, and write an individual master thesis. Students are advised to do this dissertation as a full-time job. It is possible that students may spend 1 or 2 days a week working on the client site.

Consumer Adoption of Innovations

Prof. Mónica Borges 

This seminar is offered to students who want to prepare their dissertation in the domain of Consumer Behavior, specifically regarding consumers’ adoption of innovations. What is an innovation? An innovation may be any new idea, behavior or product/service that is different from what existed or was done previously. And what is meant by adoption? Adoption is the process of a new product/service, idea or behavior integration into one's life. Consumer adoption of innovations is the process it takes for someone to learn about a new product, service, idea or behavior, express interest about it, evaluate it and finally purchasing it and using it or acquiring and performing a new behavior as intended.

Decision Making 

Prof. Cristina Mendonça; Prof. Filipa Almeida 

Every day we make decisions, yet we typically do not think or reflect much about them. If we were to scrutinize every single decision we make, we would make little else. Thus, some decisions are best left unscrutinised and just made quickly. However, everyone agrees that important decisions should be pondered upon and slow. This duality, according to Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist and Nobel laureate in economics, is at the core of decision making. This duality, according to many is both efficient and error prone and is at the core of most of our irrationality. In this seminar we will study how  one makes decisions in a domain of your interest and/or how to improve them.

Digital and Sustainable Business Models

Prof. Claudia Antunes Marante; Prof. René Bohnsack

This seminar is suitable for students that would like to write a more academic thesis. Students will work on topics all focusing on the emergence of new business models in the context of digitalization, urban and industrial transformation, and smart cities; Topic 1: Business Models & Digital Transformation; Topic 2: Digital Transformation for Sustainability; Topic 3: How blockchain-based tokenization is revolutionizing future businesses; Topic 4: Business Model Innovation and Competition in Digital Ecosystems.

Fashion, Sustainability and Purpose - A Consumer Perspective

Prof. Vera Colaço

International pressure from organizations such as the UN, policymakers, and activists are leading many fashion companies to move from traditional CSR strategies and actions to incorporate sustainable business operations (including the value chain ) that have a purpose. These companies and associated brands are encouraged to have more sustainable businesses and follow the UN 2030 Agenda led by 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)1. For example, brands such as Patagonia are moving some of their traditional business operations such as clothing production to the repair of clothes to increase its lifecycle following SDG 12. Fast fashion brands, such as H&M are also ethically sourcing some of their collections as a response to the increasing green consumerism trend that comes down from high-end designers such as Stella McCartney. The democratization of eco-materials such organic cotton, mushroom-based fabrics, circular business models that involve upcycling and waste management, or more socially-inclusive business policies are some of the purpose-oriented measures communicated by brands to elicit sales and improve consumer perceptions.
But are consumers aware of such developments? Are consumers willing to purchase from companies and brands that have a sustainable and purpose-driven orientation?

Foresight & Strategic Planning 

Prof. Duarte Ferreira

Develop Strategic Planning skills for projects or businesses endeavors, to think and act in times of uncertainty and exponential change by learning how to build and explore scenarios for the future. Understand the value and impact of strategic planning and how to use it to build competitive advantage.

Healthcare: Innovation and Transformation

Prof. Henrique Martins

Healthcare needs to change, and Quality-of-Care needs to be central priority. Not just due to high pressure of aging and raising costs, consequences of the most devastating pandemic ever, but also because citizens and individuals want to engage with health and care differently and demand high-quality services. Such change requires motivated and capacitated managers that can be leaders of healthcare innovation and transformation. The health sector needs new and bright minds that make the right questions, challenge the status quo and launch new ideas and innovation based in science and passion for better care and fostering better healthcare worldwide. This seminar will open your mind for this challenge, allow sharing with others about these changes and allow you to work on a possible personal contribution to better health and care of the future. 

Healthy and Sustainable Food Systems: Consumer and Industry Perspectives

Prof. Ana Costa

Consumers rightfully aspire that companies do their share towards securing a more sustainable, safer and fairer future to humankind, partly by supporting their own efforts to adopt more sustainable food consumption behaviors. These often transcend the mere purchase or use of new products and services, however, and frequently imply profound changes in mindset and lifestyle that are hard to achieve and maintain. Together with the lack of honest, clear, positive and reliable information about what constitutes sustainable food consumption, what trade-offs it implies in different dimensions of sustainability (climate, resources, populations, economies, ways of life) and what will be its true impact, this creates a huge misalignment between consumers’ beliefs and expectations about companies’ (and own) sustainability efforts, what these efforts really are, and, importantly, what they should be.

Internationalization: Small and Medium Businesses

Prof. Ricardo Reis; Prof. Nuno Cardeal 

The seminar aims at developing master theses focused on the study of the internationalization of small and medium companies in certain industries relevant in the Portuguese economy. We want to study what specific industries can do better to promote themselves abroad. Every edition we suggested two or more industries to be analyzed, as an example (but not one you need to choose), we describe reasons to analyze the Wine Industry.

Managing with Purpose

Prof. Andrea Caviccini

What’s the role of business in advancing society? The concept of corporate purpose, although sometimes referred to by different terms, has a longstanding history in management and strategy (Barnard 1938, Follett 1940, Drucker 1954, Selznick 1957). The discussion surrounding corporate purpose has become widespread, with leaders dedicating significant time and attention to its development, expression, and widespread adoption.Corporate purpose is often understood as a company's underlying reason for existence. Recent research is proposing purpose as a key expression of, for example, the meaningfulness of work, as a motivating and guiding force for actions, as a mechanism to foster trust among diverse stakeholders, and as a key in facilitating the ecological transition. All these definitions intersect in significant ways with the concept of strategy.

New Business Opportunities

Prof. Rute Xavier 

This seminar aims to help students developing their own concrete business idea. It is adequate for students who have a business idea and want to launch it. It is mandatory students have a concrete idea for a business venture, and it is supposed they are advanced in their thinking development before starting the seminar.

New Frontiers in Strategic Thinking

Prof. Filipa Lancastre

The first two decades of 21st century witnessed tremendous changes in the corporate environment and in the way businesses are managed. The new era is challenging classic strategic thinking based on traditional models of standardization, specialization, hierarchy, and so on. Three key drivers are disrupting conventional models and shaping how companies think about strategy. These forces call for unconventional approaches to competitive advantage, uncertainty management, and new strategic thinking. In this seminar, we investigate how modern organizations are strategizing to address the XXI century challenges.

New Product Innovation

Prof. Miguel Rita

Either being an entrepreneur or working in the marketing department of a company, product or service innovation plays a pivotal role in your success. Behind each product or service launch, there is a number of decisions to be made - from developing the initial insight, to formulating alternative paths and marketing mixes, until the culmination of the process – the launch itself.  These decisions are largely unseen by the final consumer, but they remain a fundamental part of the value creation process in modern marketing.

Responsible Business

Prof. Nuno Moreira da Cruz 

The need to act as Responsible Business (RB) is now a key element of most strategic agendas of Corporations and has now passed a point of no-return.  RB is certainly not a Fad, but an unstoppable Macro Trend and Corporations can no longer avoid the fact that their actions (and omissions) will have a scrutinized impact in markets where they operate, and relevant stakeholders will hold them responsible for it. Factors like globalization, communication technology, rising awareness of consumers, citizens, local communities, high profile breaches of Corporate Ethics, have all led to a place where leaders can no longer act without taking in consideration an holistic approach to Responsible Business (that includes economic, environmental and social sustainability). In the future, companies’ success will depend on the ability to deal with these issues, and profitability will only be consistently achieved when demands of key Stakeholders are more balanced. A new source of competitive advantage is on the rise. 

Social Responsibility and Perceived Trust: Companies, Consumers and Stakeholders

Prof. Sérgio Moreira

Contemporary society have become more and more aware that purchasable goods have inherent social value – Are the company workers provided with good working and salary conditions? Are provided the goods environmentally sustainable? Are companies compensating any negative impacts of operation in local communities? These are some of the questions that social groups, from governments to consumers, have been recurrently asking and that, consequently, companies have been effortfully working to address. It is assumed that these social responsibility practices will be well received by consumers, improving brand trust, perceived fairness, brand attitudes and, ultimately, consumption behaviors. But is it actually the case? Does Social Responsibility work in the benefit of companies, consumers and stakeholders, or it wishful thinking?

The Future of Industries

Prof. Peter Rajsingh

This seminar is ideal for those wishing to develop the capacity to identify disruptors, assess their impact on business models and stakeholders, and postulate how an industry will be reshaped as a result. For instance, strategy students might propose how an industry might be transformed once a new player takes the lead in the industry; entrepreneurship students might propose how a new player will displace incumbent companies; finance students might locate a new domain for generating alpha in an emerging asset class.

The Value of Co-Created Products

Prof. Cláudia Costa

In the interest of developing new products that meet customers’ needs in a superior way, companies are increasingly involving consumers in their innovation process. Nike, Lego, Starbucks, BMW have turned to their user base in search of added value. This new value creation has been labeled as co-creation and its benefits have been well established in the literature (Schreier et al., 2012). A more intriguing perspective is to understand how observing consumers (those that buy the product but do not participate in the co-creation process) perceive the outcome of the process (Nishikawa et al., 2017).

Virtual Teams: Effectiveness and Productivity

Prof. Ana Paula Giordano

Communication technologies have increased flexibility at work, with the Covid-19 pandemic accelerating this phenomenon. Today, remote work is persevering, and hybrid work is becoming more commonplace. Working virtually creates new opportunities for organizations and workers, but it also creates difficulties for teamwork interdependence and effectiveness. Organizational behavior research has already given us some answers and insight about what conditions might be most fruitful to develop in virtual teams and among team workers, but there are still questions to be uncovered. In this seminar students will be guided to explore research questions related to the management of motivation of team workers in hybrid and virtual teams, and also what team characteristics and practices can help enhance team effectiveness and productivity.

 

 

Content Published - May, 22nd 2023; Syllabus (draft version) Published - May, 23rd 2023; updated July, 21st 2023.

Open to students from the M.Sc. in Business Analytics.

 

Disruptive Forecasting and Business Analytics

Prof. Pedro Fernandes

This seminar is oriented towards creative and open-minded students from the MSc in Business Analytics that aim to develop an original research (dissertation) in unconventional, or even exotic topics concerned with forecasting, predictive analytics and other relevant areas.

If you have an original, or even «strange» research idea, or a new algorithm, application or product with a high disruptive potential, this is the right place for you. The main goal is to promote a start-up and collaborative culture among the seminar’s participants that could result in real original researches or even new businesses. If you dream to create your own start-up company, this is the seminar for you and for your potential co-founders from CLSBE.

With this general framework in mind, each student should define, right from the first seminar’s session, a relevant and focused research question that should avoid, cautiously, wide-range themes or topics, noting that Machine Learning (ML) / Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a complex and heterogeneous field with a lot of scientific production. Thus, each student should proceed a solid research work, focused on pertinent problems or questions, methods and original applications with high-potential impact and value-added.

The aim of this seminar is to facilitate, in an interactive and brainstorming fashion, the path of each student towards her/his own research, as well as the team’s interdisciplinary interaction and mutual learning, always having in mind that innovation, namely, in advanced analytics loves disruption, interaction and R&D of new approaches, methods and algorithms.

In order to facilitate the dissertations’ development, some examples of research themes, questions and methods will be provided. Students could adopt, recycle or adapt them for their own works. The topics to be covered are, namely, the following:

Forecasting with robust filters;
Forecasting at scale, namely, with Facebook’s Prophet or UBER’s Theta method;
Forecasting with reinforcement learning (RL);
Forecasting with regression trees (RT);
Forecasting and data analysis with Microsoft Power BI;
Innovative methods to combine forecasts;
Natural language processing (NLP): intelligent reasoning versus text as data;
Analysis of urban networks using social media data.

 

Content Published - November, 24th 2022; Syllabus Published - December, 7th 2022

Open to students from the MSc in Economics (all majors).

 

Applied Economics

Prof. Joana Silva

The dissertation seminar is designed to help students write their Master's thesis on a topic related to Applied Micro and Macroeconomics. It comprises a mix of group and individual mandatory sessions. During the course, students will be asked to present their current work and to comment on the work of others. The scientific project may be either empirical or combine theoretical with empirical work. The seminar begins with group sections showing how micro data from Government programs or firms’ transactions combined with quantitative methods can be used to solve important social problems, answer long-standing questions in macroeconomics and improve public policies. The examples provided will also show how this type of data and methods can be applied to assess the drivers and implications of firm behavior. The second part of the seminar consists of in-depth discussions of empirical papers and class presentations. 

 

Content Published - November, 24th 2022; Syllabus Published - December, 7th 2022

Open to students from M.Sc. in Finance, International M.Sc. in Finance, M.Sc. in Economics (Specialization in Finance & Banking), and International M.Sc. in Management (Specialization in Corporate Finance).

 

Empirical Analysis on Financial Institutions and Markets

Prof. Carla Soares 

How do decisions taken by policymakers influence the financing of firms and households? Policy decisions are transmitted to the economy via several channels, some of which work through financial markets and institutions. Both monetary and regulatory policies have strong effects on institutions' incentives and market pricing. The last decade has been proliferated in policy measures aimed at containing the effects of the crisis and in the revision of regulation aimed at providing a more stable and robust financial system. In this seminar, students can choose a specific policy event/measure and assess its effects. This will allow students both to identify relevant policy events and how to properly evaluate the channels through which the effects are transmitted to either markets or institutions. 

Empirical Banking and Financial Institutions Management

Prof. Diptes Bhimjee

The Dissertation Seminar essentially addresses how banking/financial risks can be properly measured, managed, and regulated in the context of a global banking/financial market. The Seminar typically focuses on the global banking industry, as well as on broader financial institutions, also taking into consideration the role played by central banks and global monetary policies. Lastly, BASEL III and Stress Testing procedures are also described, allowing students to conduct a fully integrated review of banking/financial risks in their Dissertations.

Equity Valuation

Prof. José Tudela Martins

This workshop aims to provide an overview of equity valuation methodologies, offering a set of skills that will allow students to work in the “investment advising” community.

Financial Analysis of Corporate Events

Prof. Geraldo Cerqueiro

This dissertation seminar offers participants an opportunity to select particular events and to study their financial impact on a company or on a set of companies using event study methodology. An event study attempts to measure the valuation effects of a corporate event by examining the response of the stock price around the announcement of the event. Examples of events that can be analyzed are corporate scandals, merger and acquisitions, earnings announcements, and regulatory changes.

Financing Decisions and Credit Risk

Prof. Mário Meira

This workshop guides students in their dissertation on topics related to Financing Decisions and Credit risk. The main goal is to help students relate firms’ financing decisions, such as increase or decrease of leverage and equity, with firms that present different levels of credit risk. It is crucial for a financial manager and a financial analyst to be able to understand how firms behave when their perceived credit risk changes, and how financial markets react to such events. These analyses are done using big data sets created by students combined with econometric and statistical tools. For this effect, candidates should feel comfortable using statistical and econometric software like Stata or Python.

Markets and investments

Prof. Eva Schliephake 

Working on the thesis requires students to acquire the knowledge of a specific area through a thorough literature review, understand the relevant available tools and methodology, deal with data and its limitations, perform statistical and economic analysis, interpret the numerical results and relate them to existing literature, and deriving policy recommendations. The empirical work requires the use of large databases. The databases are readily accessible for affiliates. The candidates should feel comfortable with the use of a statistical software program and econometric methods.

Mergers and Acquisitions

Prof. António Borges de Assunção

This workshop will provide an overview of the main equity valuation methodologies and the use of Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) to perform corporate reorganizations and increase shareholder value, presenting a toolset that will allow students to work in the “investments / financial advisory” community. There will be a strong conceptual approach based on academic papers. We will also discuss why and how M&A transactions take place, their role in the economy, and how they perform from the perspective of the shareholders and other stakeholders. In addition, in some sessions, we will discuss a current /” real world” transaction which should help to provide further illustration of the relevant ideas covered in the workshop.

Sustainable Finance

Prof. Zöe Venter

Both financial and economic decisions worldwide have become increasingly influenced by the scarcity of resources, the search for profits through efficiency, and the ongoing climate change battle. As such, the move to a sustainable financial system has emerged as one of the main challenges of the present generation. Sustainable finance is the process whereby we take into account environmental, social and governance considerations when making financial investment decisions. This should lead to more long-term investments in sustainable activities and projects. This seminar offers participants the opportunity study the impact that sustainable practices have on a number of factors such as bank loan costs, stock returns and profitability. Participants will also have the opportunity to look at the impact that the increased climate change awareness has on stock markets.

Venture Capital Investments

Prof. Fatima Shuwaikh 

One external means for equity financing, economic growth, and innovation are venture capital investments, which have become highly influential in the funding of entrepreneurial companies. To back their growth, entrepreneurial companies have commonly directed to venture capitalists, who often provide expertise in setting new ventures into successes, good hands-on help, and money. This seminar outlines the concept of corporate venture capital (CVC) from two main aspects: the perspective of entrepreneurial companies and the perspective of established firms (investors), focusing on the investment-related issues in the CVC program. 

 

Content Published - November, 24th 2022; Syllabus Published - December, 7th 2022

Open to students from the M.Sc. in Business, International M.Sc. in Management (all Specializations), and M.Sc. in Management (both specializations).

 

Applied  Research Topics on Strategy

Prof. Pedro Parada

The Dissertation Seminar on research topics in Strategy Builds-up on the papers written by the faculty of the seminar around key areas in strategy, mostly Corporate Strategy, international expansion and global management, and strategic change. The basic bibliography and references are the practice-oriented publication of the faculty with complementary readings. Depending on the topic selected by students they will receive further references and recommendations.

The Dissertation seminar requires students to skim through the references and choose a topic of interest. 

Automation and The Future Workplace

Prof. Filipa de Almeida e Prof. Cristina Mendonça

What we do for a living, « work » has long been a central theme in our lives. « Work » is important not only as it brings us the financial means to live but also as it can be a great source of meaning, contributing strongly to our identity, to being who we are. « Work » has been a changing idea reflecting its different realities over time. Right now, however, « work » is being disrupted as arguably, never before. AI and other technological advances (e.g., socially assistive robots, AI-based decision support systems, ...) promise to disrupt every aspect of human life, from the domestic sphere to organizations, to global markets. Yet, beyond the technical issues, the way humans react to these technologies can make or break any particular application.

Behavior Change

Prof. Daniel Fernandes

Behavior Change is arguably one of the key challenges of energizing behavioral science and researchers in recent years. We know a lot about the biases and mistakes that managers and consumers make. But we know very little about how to correct those mistakes permanently. It is relatively easy to momentarily affect someone’s actions, behaviors or the attitudes. But enduring change is rare.  Habits are learned associations between responses and features of the context in which a desired action should be performed. Features of the environment activate a certain behavioral response. Therefore, it is important to know how people can prepare for action in advance and/or learn to habitually activate a certain behavioral response.

Brand Image & Equity: From Creation to Impact

Prof. Paulo Romeiro

In this seminar, one can study the Image and Equity of Brands, Corporations, Countries, Professions, Institutions, Celebrities, etc., but also co-branding and Brand Endorsement strategies. In addition, you can study the creation of a new Image/ Equity or to results of a change in an existing one. Image can be defined as 'the sum of beliefs, attitudes, and impressions that a person or group of persons has of an object' (Barich & Kotler, 1991). Thus, it has a significant role in how we make our choices and decisions and has a cognitive and an affective factor. The image then builds Equity. Keller (1993) wrote of two stages of equity development, labeled "awareness level" and "image level", that stem from consumers' needs and wants and lead to a brand.

Building Sustainable Organizations – Strategy, Entrepreneurship and Marketing

Prof. Marta Bicho

Sustainable and Purposeful organizations are growing rapidly. These organizations have a dual mission integrated in their purpose, and offer goods and services focused on health, the environment, social justice, and sustainable living. Some of the challenges these enterprises face are the limbo between institutional and societal pressures, and also social and financial goals, which  might not be completely clear to and understood by society. Additionally, sustainable and purposeful organizations face higher skepticism from various stakeholders due to their dual identity and category cross-over. Moreover, the pandemic situation we lived, led organizations to re-think their purpose and align their business with sustainable practices, as well as, with external needs. For sustainable organizations to be successful, it is important to understand what are the relevant strategies and marketing responses at their disposal to be effective in the marketplace. It is also relevant to address what stakeholders think regarding sustainable organizations. Thus, what is the current state of enterprises with sustainable motives? What can we expect in the future from these organizations and their leaders? This seminar intends to cover topics related to building and developing sustainable organizations. 

Business Adaptive Strategies in Crisis

Prof. Ricardo Reis; Prof. Nuno Cardeal

During moments of severe economic or social crisis many companies have to adapt significantly to new markets and different operational conditions. The adaptive exercise of these venture is one of the most demanding strategic creative endeavors a manager has to embark in. Many are successful and striving businesses emerge from these processes. We want to take advantage of the current massive economic crisis and discover examples of firms, industries, products, services, institutions that changed their strategies adapting to this new reality. We are not limiting the scope to local companies, though Portuguese companies were subjected to intense economic crises within the last decade, which makes the country a particularly interesting laboratory to study this topic.

Consulting for Startups

Prof. Rute Xavier

This course is an opportunity to make a difference in the early stages of a startup’s life. Students will be challenged to cover a 360º view of a new business or a business idea to be set up.  Projects are identified by the seminar instructors and offered to students – it is not mandatory to have a previous idea to deploy the dissertation. 

Consulting Project

Prof. Rute Xavier 

This course aims to help students write their Master's thesis supported on a consulting project in a real word corporation they are proposed to develop and deploy during the semester. Consulting projects are arranged by the seminar instructor. It is adequate for Strategy and Entrepreneurship and Marketing students. It comprises a group of mandatory sessions that will help guide students in their consulting project and it will provide an overview of research methodologies, offering students the main skills to write up their thesis. Groups of two students work together on a given Consulting Project for the whole duration of the workshop, in direct contact with the client organization and pursuing their own project. However, each student needs to make an individual problem statement, literature review, and write an individual master thesis. Students are advised to do this dissertation as a full-time job. It is possible that students may spend 1 or 2 days a week working on the client site.

Decision Making 

Prof. Cristina Mendonça; Prof. Filipa Almeida 

Every day we make decisions, yet we typically do not think or reflect much about them. If we were to scrutinize every single decision we make, we would make little else. Thus, some decisions are best left unscrutinised and just made quickly. However, everyone agrees that important decisions should be pondered upon and slow. This duality, according to Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist and Nobel laureate in economics, is at the core of decision making. This duality, according to many is both efficient and error prone and is at the core of most of our irrationality. In this seminar we will study how  one makes decisions in a domain of your interest and/or how to improve them.

Fashion, Sustainability and Purpose - A Consumer Perspective

Prof. Vera Colaço

International pressure from organizations such as the UN, policymakers, and activists are leading many fashion companies to move from traditional CSR strategies and actions to incorporate sustainable business operations (including the value chain ) that have a purpose. These companies and associated brands are encouraged to have more sustainable businesses and follow the UN 2030 Agenda led by 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)1. For example, brands such as Patagonia are moving some of their traditional business operations such as clothing production to the repair of clothes to increase its lifecycle following SDG 12. Fast fashion brands, such as H&M are also ethically sourcing some of their collections as a response to the increasing green consumerism trend that comes down from high-end designers such as Stella McCartney. The democratization of eco-materials such organic cotton, mushroom-based fabrics, circular business models that involve upcycling and waste management, or more socially-inclusive business policies are some of the purpose-oriented measures communicated by brands to elicit sales and improve consumer perceptions.
But are consumers aware of such developments? Are consumers willing to purchase from companies and brands that have a sustainable and purpose-driven orientation?

Healthcare: Innovation and Transformation

Prof. Henrique Martins

Healthcare needs to change, and Quality-of-Care needs to be central priority. Not just due to high pressure of aging and raising costs, consequences of the most devastating pandemic ever, but also because citizens and individuals want to engage with health and care differently and demand high-quality services. Such change requires motivated and capacitated managers that can be leaders of healthcare innovation and transformation. The health sector needs new and bright minds that make the right questions, challenge the status quo and launch new ideas and innovation based in science and passion for better care and fostering better healthcare worldwide. This seminar will open your mind for this challenge, allow sharing with others about these changes and allow you to work on a possible personal contribution to better health and care of the future. 

Internationalization: Small and Medium Businesses

Prof. Ricardo Reis; Prof. Nuno Cardeal 

The seminar aims at developing master theses focused on the study of the internationalization of small and medium companies in certain industries relevant in the Portuguese economy. We want to study what specific industries can do better to promote themselves abroad. Every edition we suggested two or more industries to be analyzed, as an example (but not one you need to choose), we describe reasons to analyze the Wine Industry.

Marketing and Hedonic Experiences

Prof. João Niza Braga 

This seminar examines research on how consumers represent their hedonic experiences and how these representations guide consumer decisions and social interactions in the marketplace, but also in organizational contexts. Finally, we explore how this research can build insights for marketers or managers.

New Product Innovation

Prof. Miguel Rita

Either being an entrepreneur or working in the marketing department of a company, product or service innovation plays a pivotal role in your success. Behind each product or service launch, there is a number of decisions to be made - from developing the initial insight, to formulating alternative paths and marketing mixes, until the culmination of the process – the launch itself.  These decisions are largely unseen by the final consumer, but they remain a fundamental part of the value creation process in modern marketing.

Product Management in Consumer Packaged Goods

Prof. Paulo Romeiro 

Brand or Product Management is a crucial part of the marketing function in many Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) Companies, having direct contact with advertising, promotion, and sales. These companies are selling more variations of products in more places to more types of customers against more competitors. Therefore, they are getting increasingly complex, and this compromise overall effectiveness and results. This seminar aims to help students prepare their MSc Dissertation in the area of CPG Brand or Product Management, with a focus on the effectiveness of promotions, packaging, and point of sale communications.

Qualitative studies in luxury, fashion and other creative industries

Prof. Laure Leglise 

Companies in creative industries, such as luxury, fashion, publishing, architecture, film making and production, make students and workers dream, inspire consumers, while high margins in luxury attract investors. However, these industries face nowadays several challenges such as the digitalization trends, pressures for sustainability, the growing importance of Asian markets and pressures of investors to be more profitable. This seminar focuses on these industries and the current challenges they face by adopting a qualitative approach.

Responsible Business

Prof. Nuno Moreira da Cruz 

The need to act as Responsible Business (RB) is now a key element of most strategic agendas of Corporations and has now passed a point of no-return.  RB is certainly not a Fad, but an unstoppable Macro Trend and Corporations can no longer avoid the fact that their actions (and omissions) will have a scrutinized impact in markets where they operate, and relevant stakeholders will hold them responsible for it. Factors like globalization, communication technology, rising awareness of consumers, citizens, local communities, high profile breaches of Corporate Ethics, have all led to a place where leaders can no longer act without taking in consideration an holistic approach to Responsible Business (that includes economic, environmental and social sustainability). In the future, companies’ success will depend on the ability to deal with these issues, and profitability will only be consistently achieved when demands of key Stakeholders are more balanced. A new source of competitive advantage is on the rise. 

Social Responsibility and Perceived Trust: Companies, Consumers and Stakeholders

Prof. Sérgio Moreira

Contemporary society have become more and more aware that purchasable goods have inherent social value – Are the company workers provided with good working and salary conditions? Are provided the goods environmentally sustainable? Are companies compensating any negative impacts of operation in local communities? These are some of the questions that social groups, from governments to consumers, have been recurrently asking and that, consequently, companies have been effortfully working to address. It is assumed that these social responsibility practices will be well received by consumers, improving brand trust, perceived fairness, brand attitudes and, ultimately, consumption behaviors. But is it actually the case? Does Social Responsibility work in the benefit of companies, consumers and stakeholders, or it wishful thinking?

The Value of Co-Created Products

Prof. Cláudia Costa

In the interest of developing new products that meet customers’ needs in a superior way, companies are increasingly involving consumers in their innovation process. Nike, Lego, Starbucks, BMW have turned to their user base in search of added value. This new value creation has been labeled as co-creation and its benefits have been well established in the literature (Schreier et al., 2012). A more intriguing perspective is to understand how observing consumers (those that buy the product but do not participate in the co-creation process) perceive the outcome of the process (Nishikawa et al., 2017).

Tourism Marketing

Prof. Helena Rodrigues 

Every industry faces new trends and challenges! The tourism industry is no exception as coronavirus infections continue to rise all over the world, countries also face serious threats for their visitors. New trends in tourism appear and are taking hold since the beginning of this new decade. Changing demographics, technological advances, closed borders, grounded airplanes and shifting social mores. These influences give rise to important new tourism trends and this seminar aims to find new tourism trends to watch.    

Transition to sustainable, circular and regenerative business models

Prof. Laure Leglise

Grand challenges, such as climate change, poverty or social inequality, call for a profound rethinking of the purpose of business in society, and question the nature of strategy competition and value creation. Since business activities play an important role in this context, firms are increasingly confronted with demands to change toward more sustainable strategies and business models. This seminar invites students to answer questions related to these challenges and their impact on corporate strategy.   

Well-being: innovation and impact on personal choice

Prof. João Niza Braga; Prof. Sofia Jacinto

This seminar will thus study the processes underlying consumers’ judgements and decisions about health and well-being related products and services in different social and health contexts. This seminar will put a particular emphasis on how these decisions are impacted by technological advances and medical innovation as well as by consumers’ and companies’ growing concerns with the ethical and sustainable aspects of the well-being and health industries.

 

 

Content Published - November, 24th 2022; Syllabus Published - December, 7th 2022

Open to students from the M.Sc. in Business, International M.Sc. in Management (all Specializations), and M.Sc. in Management (both specializations).

 

Applied  Research Topics on Strategy

Prof. Pedro Parada

The Dissertation Seminar on research topics in Strategy Builds-up on the papers written by the faculty of the seminar around key areas in strategy, mostly Corporate Strategy, international expansion and global management, and strategic change. The basic bibliography and references are the practice-oriented publication of the faculty with complementary readings. Depending on the topic selected by students they will receive further references and recommendations.

The Dissertation seminar requires students to skim through the references and choose a topic of interest. 

Automation and The Future Workplace

Prof. Filipa de Almeida e Prof. Cristina Mendonça

What we do for a living, « work » has long been a central theme in our lives. « Work » is important not only as it brings us the financial means to live but also as it can be a great source of meaning, contributing strongly to our identity, to being who we are. « Work » has been a changing idea reflecting its different realities over time. Right now, however, « work » is being disrupted as arguably, never before. AI and other technological advances (e.g., socially assistive robots, AI-based decision support systems, ...) promise to disrupt every aspect of human life, from the domestic sphere to organizations, to global markets. Yet, beyond the technical issues, the way humans react to these technologies can make or break any particular application.

Building Sustainable Organizations – Strategy, Entrepreneurship and Marketing

Prof. Marta Bicho

Sustainable and Purposeful organizations are growing rapidly. These organizations have a dual mission integrated in their purpose, and offer goods and services focused on health, the environment, social justice, and sustainable living. Some of the challenges these enterprises face are the limbo between institutional and societal pressures, and also social and financial goals, which  might not be completely clear to and understood by society. Additionally, sustainable and purposeful organizations face higher skepticism from various stakeholders due to their dual identity and category cross-over. Moreover, the pandemic situation we lived, led organizations to re-think their purpose and align their business with sustainable practices, as well as, with external needs. For sustainable organizations to be successful, it is important to understand what are the relevant strategies and marketing responses at their disposal to be effective in the marketplace. It is also relevant to address what stakeholders think regarding sustainable organizations. Thus, what is the current state of enterprises with sustainable motives? What can we expect in the future from these organizations and their leaders? This seminar intends to cover topics related to building and developing sustainable organizations. 

Business Adaptive Strategies in Crisis

Prof. Ricardo Reis; Prof. Nuno Cardeal

During moments of severe economic or social crisis many companies have to adapt significantly to new markets and different operational conditions. The adaptive exercise of these venture is one of the most demanding strategic creative endeavors a manager has to embark in. Many are successful and striving businesses emerge from these processes. We want to take advantage of the current massive economic crisis and discover examples of firms, industries, products, services, institutions that changed their strategies adapting to this new reality. We are not limiting the scope to local companies, though Portuguese companies were subjected to intense economic crises within the last decade, which makes the country a particularly interesting laboratory to study this topic.

Business Strategy Case Studies

Prof. Nuno Guedes 

This workshop aims to help students to write their thesis around the development of a teaching case on business strategy. The emphasis of this workshop will be on implementation issues of strategic concepts. Students will be encouraged to explore situations in which companies have faced operational problems and dilemmas resulting from strategic decisions.

Competitive Advantage

Prof. Peter Rajsingh  

This Seminar engages with a fundamental notion in business and strategy – competitive advantage (CA). Students will define a topic in some domain and drill down to discover drivers of competitive positioning, their nature, and durability. This plays out against the background of Schumpeter’s insight that “creative destruction” is the major dynamic defining competitive capitalism. 

Consulting for Startups

Prof. Rute Xavier

This course is an opportunity to make a difference in the early stages of a startup’s life. Students will be challenged to cover a 360º view of a new business or a business idea to be set up.  Projects are identified by the seminar instructors and offered to students – it is not mandatory to have a previous idea to deploy the dissertation. 

Consulting Project

Prof. Rute Xavier 

This course aims to help students write their Master's thesis supported on a consulting project in a real word corporation they are proposed to develop and deploy during the semester. Consulting projects are arranged by the seminar instructor. It is adequate for Strategy and Entrepreneurship and Marketing students. It comprises a group of mandatory sessions that will help guide students in their consulting project and it will provide an overview of research methodologies, offering students the main skills to write up their thesis. Groups of two students work together on a given Consulting Project for the whole duration of the workshop, in direct contact with the client organization and pursuing their own project. However, each student needs to make an individual problem statement, literature review, and write an individual master thesis. Students are advised to do this dissertation as a full-time job. It is possible that students may spend 1 or 2 days a week working on the client site.

Decision Making 

Prof. Cristina Mendonça; Prof. Filipa Almeida 

Every day we make decisions, yet we typically do not think or reflect much about them. If we were to scrutinize every single decision we make, we would make little else. Thus, some decisions are best left unscrutinised and just made quickly. However, everyone agrees that important decisions should be pondered upon and slow. This duality, according to Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist and Nobel laureate in economics, is at the core of decision making. This duality, according to many is both efficient and error prone and is at the core of most of our irrationality. In this seminar we will study how  one makes decisions in a domain of your interest and/or how to improve them.

Digital and Sustainable Business Models

Prof. Claudia Antunes Marante; Prof. René Bohnsack

This seminar is suitable for students that would like to write a more academic thesis. Students will work on topics all focusing on the emergence of new business models in the context of digitalization, urban and industrial transformation, and smart cities; Topic 1: Business Models & Digital Transformation; Topic 2: Digital Transformation for Sustainability; Topic 3: How blockchain-based tokenization is revolutionizing future businesses; Topic 4: Business Model Innovation and Competition in Digital Ecosystems.

Fashion, Sustainability and Purpose - A Consumer Perspective

Prof. Vera Colaço

International pressure from organizations such as the UN, policymakers, and activists are leading many fashion companies to move from traditional CSR strategies and actions to incorporate sustainable business operations (including the value chain ) that have a purpose. These companies and associated brands are encouraged to have more sustainable businesses and follow the UN 2030 Agenda led by 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)1. For example, brands such as Patagonia are moving some of their traditional business operations such as clothing production to the repair of clothes to increase its lifecycle following SDG 12. Fast fashion brands, such as H&M are also ethically sourcing some of their collections as a response to the increasing green consumerism trend that comes down from high-end designers such as Stella McCartney. The democratization of eco-materials such organic cotton, mushroom-based fabrics, circular business models that involve upcycling and waste management, or more socially-inclusive business policies are some of the purpose-oriented measures communicated by brands to elicit sales and improve consumer perceptions.
But are consumers aware of such developments? Are consumers willing to purchase from companies and brands that have a sustainable and purpose-driven orientation?

Healthcare: Innovation and Transformation

Prof. Henrique Martins

Healthcare needs to change, and Quality-of-Care needs to be central priority. Not just due to high pressure of aging and raising costs, consequences of the most devastating pandemic ever, but also because citizens and individuals want to engage with health and care differently and demand high-quality services. Such change requires motivated and capacitated managers that can be leaders of healthcare innovation and transformation. The health sector needs new and bright minds that make the right questions, challenge the status quo and launch new ideas and innovation based in science and passion for better care and fostering better healthcare worldwide. This seminar will open your mind for this challenge, allow sharing with others about these changes and allow you to work on a possible personal contribution to better health and care of the future. 

Internationalization: Small and Medium Businesses

Prof. Ricardo Reis; Prof. Nuno Cardeal 

The seminar aims at developing master theses focused on the study of the internationalization of small and medium companies in certain industries relevant in the Portuguese economy. We want to study what specific industries can do better to promote themselves abroad. Every edition we suggested two or more industries to be analyzed, as an example (but not one you need to choose), we describe reasons to analyze the Wine Industry.

New Business Opportunities

Prof. Rute Xavier 

This seminar aims to help students developing their own concrete business idea. It is adequate for students who have a business idea and want to launch it. It is mandatory students have a concrete idea for a business venture, and it is supposed they are advanced in their thinking development before starting the seminar.

New Frontiers in Strategic Thinking

Prof. Filipa Lancastre

The first two decades of 21st century witnessed tremendous changes in the corporate environment and in the way businesses are managed. The new era is challenging classic strategic thinking based on traditional models of standardization, specialization, hierarchy, and so on. Three key drivers are disrupting conventional models and shaping how companies think about strategy. These forces call for unconventional approaches to competitive advantage, uncertainty management, and new strategic thinking. In this seminar, we investigate how modern organizations are strategizing to address the XXI century challenges.

New Product Innovation

Prof. Miguel Rita

Either being an entrepreneur or working in the marketing department of a company, product or service innovation plays a pivotal role in your success. Behind each product or service launch, there is a number of decisions to be made - from developing the initial insight, to formulating alternative paths and marketing mixes, until the culmination of the process – the launch itself.  These decisions are largely unseen by the final consumer, but they remain a fundamental part of the value creation process in modern marketing.

Qualitative studies in luxury, fashion and other creative industries

Prof. Laure Leglise 

Companies in creative industries, such as luxury, fashion, publishing, architecture, film making and production, make students and workers dream, inspire consumers, while high margins in luxury attract investors. However, these industries face nowadays several challenges such as the digitalization trends, pressures for sustainability, the growing importance of Asian markets and pressures of investors to be more profitable. This seminar focuses on these industries and the current challenges they face by adopting a qualitative approach.

Responsible Business

Prof. Nuno Moreira da Cruz 

The need to act as Responsible Business (RB) is now a key element of most strategic agendas of Corporations and has now passed a point of no-return.  RB is certainly not a Fad, but an unstoppable Macro Trend and Corporations can no longer avoid the fact that their actions (and omissions) will have a scrutinized impact in markets where they operate, and relevant stakeholders will hold them responsible for it. Factors like globalization, communication technology, rising awareness of consumers, citizens, local communities, high profile breaches of Corporate Ethics, have all led to a place where leaders can no longer act without taking in consideration an holistic approach to Responsible Business (that includes economic, environmental and social sustainability). In the future, companies’ success will depend on the ability to deal with these issues, and profitability will only be consistently achieved when demands of key Stakeholders are more balanced. A new source of competitive advantage is on the rise. 

Social Responsibility and Perceived Trust: Companies, Consumers and Stakeholders

Prof. Sérgio Moreira

Contemporary society have become more and more aware that purchasable goods have inherent social value – Are the company workers provided with good working and salary conditions? Are provided the goods environmentally sustainable? Are companies compensating any negative impacts of operation in local communities? These are some of the questions that social groups, from governments to consumers, have been recurrently asking and that, consequently, companies have been effortfully working to address. It is assumed that these social responsibility practices will be well received by consumers, improving brand trust, perceived fairness, brand attitudes and, ultimately, consumption behaviors. But is it actually the case? Does Social Responsibility work in the benefit of companies, consumers and stakeholders, or it wishful thinking?

The Future of Industries

Prof. Peter Rajsingh

This seminar is ideal for those wishing to develop the capacity to identify disruptors, assess their impact on business models and stakeholders, and postulate how an industry will be reshaped as a result. For instance, strategy students might propose how an industry might be transformed once a new player takes the lead in the industry; entrepreneurship students might propose how a new player will displace incumbent companies; finance students might locate a new domain for generating alpha in an emerging asset class.

The Value of Co-Created Products

Prof. Cláudia Costa

In the interest of developing new products that meet customers’ needs in a superior way, companies are increasingly involving consumers in their innovation process. Nike, Lego, Starbucks, BMW have turned to their user base in search of added value. This new value creation has been labeled as co-creation and its benefits have been well established in the literature (Schreier et al., 2012). A more intriguing perspective is to understand how observing consumers (those that buy the product but do not participate in the co-creation process) perceive the outcome of the process (Nishikawa et al., 2017).

Transition to sustainable, circular and regenerative business models

Prof. Laure Leglise

Grand challenges, such as climate change, poverty or social inequality, call for a profound rethinking of the purpose of business in society, and question the nature of strategy competition and value creation. Since business activities play an important role in this context, firms are increasingly confronted with demands to change toward more sustainable strategies and business models. This seminar invites students to answer questions related to these challenges and their impact on corporate strategy.   

 

 

Content Published - November, 24th 2022; Syllabus Published - December, 9th 2022

Independent Process

If a student chooses the Independent process route, they are responsible for determining the topic or topics of interest and finding a CATÓLICA-LISBON professor that is willing to serve as an advisor on that topic or is willing to propose an alternative topic. The student is also responsible to ensure the communication with the advisor and the setting of goals and drafts delivery dates. As such Master's students should only follow an independent process in exceptional circumstances. 

Additionally, students often found it difficult to find a suitable faculty member that is both an expert in the area a student wants to work in and also has the time to supervise individual students. In most cases, faculty members are already fully committed in terms of their academic duties. 

The CATÓLICA-LISBON faculty members list can be found on our website, link HERE.

In order to apply for an Independent Process, the students must prepare a dissertation proposal using the recommended template HERE, and submit it to the Master Affairs department utilizing the registration form (found below).

The document must be signed by the student and the advisor and delivered by the deadline. Please keep in mind that you also need to submit the advisor's written consent (example: the email transcript saved in PDF format). 

The Academic Director will then review your proposal and approve or not approve your document. Students will be receiving this information by email.

For the Independent Process deadlines and other relevant dates, please click HERE.

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Your independent process proposal can be submitted through the following link HERE.

Supervisor's Role

It is important to meet early with your supervisor to clarify the objectives and methods of the proposed dissertation, and to agree on a timetable for future deadlines and meetings. If a student is not enrolled in a dissertation seminar, he or she should take the initiative to arrange this and other meetings.

Your supervisor will comment on your ideas, suggest readings, and advise you on major challenges. Your supervisor is not expected to provide you with a list of all required readings. Your supervisor will normally comment on a close-to-final draft.

The role of the supervisor is to guide you through the process, answer questions, and provide advice and expertise, and not to edit, revise, or write any part of your dissertation. At the same time ensuring that the dissertation will be mainly based on your own work and ideas. It is up to you to implement the suggestions you receive.

The quality of the dissertation is defined not only by its content but also by the way the content is presented and communicated. It is your responsibility to assure the quality of your written communication.

Change or Cancel your Dissertation Supervision

Students who are enrolled in dissertation, either in a seminar or an independent process, and wish to enrol in a new seminar or independent process, must first cancel their previous enrolment. 

Kindly notice that, only under exceptional circumstances, can the students enrol in a new and different seminar. In this event, a formal request must be made in e-SCA. The steps are as follows:

  • Select Services
  • Request
  • In Request content, please direct it to the “Dean of faculty”, and on the subject select “Other”.

Then, you will have a field where you will be able to write your request. Make sure to address it to the Academic Director, mentioning you want to cancel your dissertation seminar or IP, and specify the reason behind the request.

After 24 hours, return to e-SCA to verify the payments references, and settled the corresponding fee.

The Academic Director will approve or not approve your request. You will receive an e-mail with this information, and it will also be posted on e-SCA.

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