Two of Portugal’s six business schools have joined forces through a partnership with MIT’s Sloan School of Management to create a new Lisbon MBA program with a focus on teaching interpersonal skills as part of the curriculum, the Financial Times reports.
Lisbon’s Universidade Nova and Universidade Católica, generally rivals, have joined together in cooperative competition in the interest of building recognition of Portugal as a center for excellence in business education, according to the FT.
“I think the programme will have a wide impact on business education in Portugal,” José Ferreira Machado, dean of the economics faculty at Nova, told the FT. “Achieving international distinction in an area like business education does wonders for the image of the country as a whole.”
As part of the new one-year, English-language MBA program, students spend a month in Boston at MIT Sloan, attending innovation and entrepreneurship courses. Sloan professors will also visit Portugal, and Lisbon faculty members will undertake research in the United States.
Beyond making partners out of rival universities, the program sets itself apart through its focus on teaching soft skills, says Belén de Vicente, the course’s executive director. “We determined from the outset to focus on interpersonal skills in a different and more holistic way,” she told the FT. “The way a job candidate has learned to lead, communicate and manage conflicts can make a fundamental difference between two people with an otherwise similar education.”
To develop these so-called soft skills, the program includes weekly, all-day “Friday Forums” during which students take part in hands-on experiences, such as devising a perfume marketing campaign or learning the art of writing and singing traditional Portuguese folk music from professional singers, according to the FT report.
The Lisbon MBA, which starts in January, is now in its second year. In each of its first two years, the program attracted 32 students, more than 40 per cent of them women. The number of overseas students grew from 25 percent in the first year to 38 percent this year. The goal is to increase class size to a maximum of 50 in the medium term and to achieve a 50-50 balance between the sexes as well as between Portuguese students and students from overseas.
With fewer than 100 core faculty members between them, Cátolica and Nova still lack international brand awareness and critical mass, but with the new Lisbon MBA they are gaining ground. Indeed, the two schools have achieved the “triple crown” of accreditation by the international bodies AACSB, Equis and Amba. “We have advanced from playing the game to helping define the rules,” Fátima Barros, dean of the Católica economics faculty, told the FT.
To learn more about the new Lisbon MBA, click here.
Read the full article: Rival Portuguese Business Schools Partner to Offer Joint MBA Program with MIT Sloan