Coordination: José Porfírio; Vice-coordination: Jacinto Jardim

Presentation

The Management, Entrepreneurship and Governance for Development Research Group is devoted to studying the development of human society, based on the analysis of the influence and the proposal of models with prominent scientific areas such as Management-Entrepreneurship and Economics, as well as the framework contributing to the analysis of effects of globalisation in this process. As its operating principle, the Group will assume that the scientific areas at its charge are, by nature, privileged to function as support and also as connection, bordering, but also serving as a critical complement and even interconnecting with other essential areas in the field of Human and Social Sciences, as well as Exact Sciences and even Health Sciences and Biology.

Thus, this Group’s action should give priority to programs and projects that can effectively assume transdisciplinary practices, more than simply promoting multi or interdisciplinary perspectives, which may advocate a true integration of approaches, in favour of integral and harmonious human development, starting from its core disciplinary areas of approach.

This Group should develop its activities based on the awareness that the Human Being, as a complex biological, physical and spiritual being, should always be the centre of development, from which almost everything emanates and towards which almost everything tends. However, due to its complexity, this development will always be a process that should not favour one vision and even less one isolated discipline, but rather an integral approach, comprising the intellectual, physical, emotional, social and cultural components of humanity and based on crucial humanistic values to guide all these development processes. Therefore, our pillars will be to take the integral ecology principle into consideration and the awareness that the entire universe is our common home, which we must care for and preserve. The values that will guide this Research Group’s actions will emanate from those pillars. The Group is aware that the developmental processes promoted to date suffer from the fact that they inadequately attribute more or less weight to some disciplinary areas, thus becoming incomplete and proving almost always incapable of achieving a true model of sustainable development. As such, it will tend to assume that true development will only be possible when the Human Being manages to be in harmony with his or hers own nature, with those around him or her, under a common good rationale, and also in harmony, under a sustainable rationalel, with the environment.

From these principles and the values that emanate from them, we will give priority to the development of research and projects that allow the funding of research and the promotion of networks within the Centre and with external researchers, thus at the same time promoting a multinational perspective that can bring the cultural issue into the discussion of this transdisciplinary logic we wish to implement.

Because of its innovative approach, which we hope can break down barriers and established traditions in the scientific approach, we also believe that an essential aspect
of this Group will be its ability to anticipate the future, in conjunction with actors in society and the national and international economies. This will permit us to steer the major development trends, to tackle the resolution of specific problems that affect development today and to create border areas of science for the full development of tomorrow’s humanity.

We will focus our approach on the search for answers to humanity’s major problems, whose causes can be found either in the Sustainable Development Goals promoted by the UN or in Great Reset’s principles, promoted by the World Economic Forum. Although we may criticize them and not accept them in their entirety, it seems unquestionable to us that they serve, at least, as a basis for the beginning of serious work on the real major problems and challenges facing humanity today. According to the conjoint action represented by the Centre for Global Studies, in which the research groups intersect, it is believed that some lines are, by nature, transversal to the different groups. The transversal focus will lie on the response to the great problems that beset humanity, finding fertile ground for promoting useful and extremely high-quality research. For this, planned organisation, the Group’s strategic orientation and, of course, the quality of its own body of proposed researchers shall be accounted for. Rigour, demand and quality, focused on the usefulness of the work developed and on the healthy interaction with society, constitute essential values to be promoted in this group and in order to achieve the proposed objectives. Based on these principles, the Research Group’s main objectives were defined in the first place.

Objectives

• To meet the Research Group’s purpose.
• To rethink development from a global, more inclusive and more integrating perspective – to build an “observatory for the future” and to promote a set of think-tanks that can undertake regular actions to feed this permanent thinking.
• To assess how Management, Entrepreneurship and Economics can contribute more effectively to global development, from a more human-centred and sustainable rationale.
• To redesign development processes from a transdisciplinary perspective.
• To define a set of stakeholders that provide for the development of working areas focused mainly on solving some of humanity’s problems.
• To define concrete research areas, preferably interrelated with other CEG-UAb groups and research lines.
• To develop, if possible, inter- and transdisciplinary working groups for the specific development of projects and research, preferably together with the identified stakeholders.
• To identify and develop a set of publications that may disseminate the different groups’s results and the projects being developed.
• To organize scientific events related to the Research Group’s themes.
• To reshape existing formal and non-formal teaching offers and to develop innovative offers.

Projects and initiatives

• Humanity’s purpose and sustainable development: what role for management and governance?
• The role of purpose in developing people-centred management.
• Entrepreneurial attitude as a source of development and the human being’s harmony.
• Rethinking our common home: what role for Economics and Management in global development?
• Enhancing Management for Development.
• Society’s digitisation and its impact on the development of humanity: how can Management help create a better world?
• Impact of leadership for purpose on the development of society and economy.
• Family businesses: how to combine purpose with development?
• Techno-globalisation and development: people at the centre.
• Global, glocal or local: what is the new paradigm?
• Teaching management and entrepreneurship education as a developmental core.
• The importance of policies in strengthening institutions and for progress.
• Good practices in purpose-driven governance.
• Entrepreneurship for development and inclusion.
• New business models for traditional businesses.
• Business models for the circular economy.
• Future business models.
• From virtual companies to future companies.