In today’s post we asked Rui Coutinho and Catarina Reis about the involvement of the Porto Business School (PBS) in the UCITYLAB project, the vision of PBS in their engagement with urban stakeholders, and the potential impact of these collaborations on the city.
Porto Business School (PBS) was founded 30 years ago to address a common challenge: the gap between the levels of qualification and skills that Higher Education Institutions (HEI) delivered to young professionals and the level of expectations and demand companies requested to their workers. PBS was born out of the will and the passion of a few business people and the vision and boldness of the University of Porto. Still today, PBS’s governance model displays this unique DNA: academia and companies are shareholders, with equal decision power, and the educational offer is fully aligned with identified market needs.
Today, however, we are witnessing new collaboration models and new untapped opportunities: HEI’s are not taking full advantage (nor being active problem solvers) of the urban ecosystems they are based in. We know for quite some time that universities don’t have only the mission of teaching and researching, but in fact they are progressively getting involved with their surroundings, which means having an active role in their communities’ progress. It is not enough for universities to create knowledge, it is mandatory that that knowledge results in real economic value, but also social, cultural and environmental value. This goal can only be achieved if everyone is involved with a true triple-helix approach: universities, companies and cities working side by side to identify and co-create new solutions for collective urban problems, aiming at a sustainable economic, social, cultural and environmental added value. PBS aims at being on the edge of this co-creation, which motivated its participation on UCITYLAB.
Entrepreneurship is part of PBS’s DNA. That’s why we believe that, in order to truly co-create new solutions for the cities, we need to include technology centres and incubators, to support startups and spin-offs creation or to organise new open innovation challenges. These actions will only be successful if we identify the problems and needs the city presents, if the potential new products or services are able to solve them, if they are able to exploit the city’s resources, if they have a strong business case and also if they take advantage of the upstream and downstream synergies in its value chain. In conclusion, it is crucial to know if the potential new solutions and business models fit the city’s characteristics.
Besides that, we believe that looking into the city we are based in and detecting the challenges it faces, as well as the biggest tendencies, it’s the best way to be innovative in our education portfolio, developing learning methodologies and programs that enable the improvement of the needed skills for the city progress.
Furthermore, we are a collaborative school, differentiated due to the knowledge sharing and value co-creation, so the establishment of partnerships with city stakeholders is perfectly aligned with our modus operandi, being potentially beneficial not only for this specific project, but also for future opportunities. Therefore, we expect that UCITYLAB will enable PBS to help solving some societal challenges in Porto, in partnership with the city government and all the urban stakeholders and will inspire our students to the topic of co-creation for urban development.
By learning with other cities’ good practices and by testing new co-creation practices and solutions, we aim at helping the city of Porto’s endeavours to become a smarter city by creating a new course on urban co-creation that remains beyond the project lifetime, reinforcing the constant connection between PBS and the city and, therefore, having a positive impact on its citizens lives.