Research Action Lines

TRIE MODEL

Action 1 – Ecosystems Transdisciplinary research

Purpose

In the last few years, the contextual conditions for organizations have changed considerably due to technical and digital, as well as social, legal, and ecological developments. It’s not necessarily that more things are changing or changing faster than they did in the past. What’s different is that changes are now much more pervasive, and they’re also more apt to interact with each other to create additional change.

Also, now-a-days, an Ecosystem needs to be understood as a property of a complex system, characterized by nonlinearity, unpredictability, and interdependence. Hence, ecosystems are no longer a property of an individual company, product, or service. However, a gap remains regarding the strategies that can be adopted to manage people and organizations from an ecosystem perspective.

Businesses have shifted from vertical integration to ecosystems, and as those ecosystems become bigger and more intricate and interconnected, changes are transmitted further, touch more entities, and take unanticipated paths to appear in unexpected places. The resulting complex, chaotic, the pressure for circularity and hence unpredictable environment calls for us to go beyond anticipating potential futures to sensing and acting on unanticipated futures. We need to engage with actual possibilities.

But how do we sense and act at pace when these possibilities emerge at the edge of overlapping ecosystems outside the firm? By connecting across boundaries, exchanging ideas, and learning about each other’s capabilities, gaining the knowledge and connections to help companies to develop new ideas and navigate the relationships needed to make them happen.

An organization needs to excel at “listening” to the ecosystem to find out what and where the new possibilities are. To encourage productive ideas, it needs to understand how to help increase the range of possibilities that the ecosystem creates—to foster the cross-boundary collaboration, co-creation and creativity that generates them. And to benefit from those ideas, it needs to be able to sense where in the ecosystem the most promising possibilities are developing

We will deal with questions at the ecosystem level, such as:

• What’s a Business Organizational Ecosystem?
• How do Ecosystems develop, mature, and break up?
• What roles do individuals, groups, and organizations play in an Ecosystem?
• When is it best to enter an ecosystem and when to leave it?

We also study the strategic decisions and changes made by Organizations in the ecosystem context:

• How do people make strategic decisions that affect Ecosystems?
• How do you organize effectively in Ecosystems?
• What changes are necessary in established companies that are confronted with ecosystems?

Observatories

Continuous Field Research – These observatories will be a continuous area of research on the ground, according to specific themes proposed by TRIE researchers that aim to generate and validate data that can feed your research, that focus on the contribution to the scientific community and the knowledge areas (e.g. LEO tourism, ECCO corporate citizenship, STUDY business sciences students) supporting organizational development, data decision-making, innovation processes.

For TRIE, the observatories are an element of constant information gathering, generation, bilaterally: (a) from people to organizations and (b) from organizations to people. This continuous flow will allow TRIE to gain insights for its fundamental research, validate data for its partners and act pro-positively to give indicators of change to the sector.

Living Labs

TRIE Living Labs are based on transdisciplinary methodologies, researches and translates cutting-edge strategic thinking into business and public governance institutions. We develop and build on leading knowledge and explore ideas that shape the strategizing of tomorrow. We work with leading academics, visionary entrepreneurs, and stablished business partners to advance the practice of strategy making today and in the future.

Future Invisioning Labs

Strategy Edge research indicates that effective strategy work is a combination of creativity (identifying options) and choosing the superior strategy decision-making pathways. Strategy Future Invisioning Ecosystems it’s designed with two building blocks: Exploration and Future Edge.

Action 2 – Research lines

Tourism

Tourism is a complex phenomenon with a wide range of impacts and potential benefits to territories and stakeholders. Moreover, as an open system, tourism is one of the first sectors to be severely affected by changes in the global social, economic, and political context. In this vein, a holistic understanding of this phenomenon is essential for a sustainable management of the activity. Therefore, this research line focuses on the Tourism Innovation Ecosystem, that is, on the interrelations between the various actors involved or interested in the tourism industry within a destination or a cluster of destinations, aiming to achieve synergy between them. Thus, the projects carried out by this research line are expected to point to ways in which tourism businesses and destinations can innovate to achieve competitive advantages while protecting local resources and benefitting local economies and populations.

Management, Innovation & Entrepreneurship

Advancing globalization is one of the most central topics among top management of companies. Companies and their global value chains are under increasing pressure: growing government regulations, Britain’s exit from the European Union, punitive tariffs, increasing migration and the new trade powers of China and India are just a few of the issues companies face worldwide. In addition, technological change towards digitized value creation and the ability to market globally at lower costs are constantly raising new ordeals. We address these challenges with our research line Management, Innovation & Entrepreneurship. Current research projects explore how companies categorize opportunities and threats because of environmental change, deal with uncertainty and become more resilient. We are focuses on issues affecting companies and their interaction within product and factor markets. Among other things, the research line deals with the following matters: for example, what are business development dimensions and drivers? How do companies interact with one another and with their environment? What are the properties and effects of these interactions? What is a competitive advantage? How can companies build a competitive advantage and benefit from it in a changing world? How can startups and mature companies dialogue?

Economy, Finances and Accounting

Economy, Finances and Accounting is a research line of TRIE, which aims to be at the forefront of 21st century economic insights.

The increasingly globalized world, with natural resources exhaustion, inter and intra generational inequalities, and the pressure of population growth, poses daunting economic challenges for this century. Different areas, such as the environment transition and the management of the global commons, the energetic transition, and the technological transition related to the internet of things, the knowledge and data economics imposes new perspectives over the concept of sustainability and global markets. The need to understand their present and forthcoming impacts in the world economies motivates our research.

Economics, as a science of means (Hotelling, 1938) plays a key role in analyzing these new questions and the impacts on the overall society dynamics. By applying innovative methodologies from economic science, the scope of our research encompasses a broad economic field capable of accommodate emerging issues from the fast-changing economy, be them environmental, energetic, technological, economic, social or political.

Mergers and acquisitions are an important engine of transformation in the global economy with significant influence on national and international production networks, market relations and competitive dynamics. This also deals with the research area covering alliances for ecosystems. More and more companies are coming together in cooperative systems to jointly create a collective benefit promise. The emergence of digital platforms is becoming increasingly important in many industries.

Our team has a diverse range of backgrounds which allows to keep pace with this complex reality. The research line will foster the collaboration of post-graduate students from Lusófona University, and partnerships with the private sector, and other national and international academic and civil society organizations, seeking to put economic science at the service of the global community.

Human Resources and Organizational Development

Human Resources Management strategies enable organizational development, since they have the potential to leverage critical outcomes like innovation, adaptation, and resilience. These outcomes are important to a large variety of organizational contexts, including industry, business, safety, healthcare, research, and education. Relevant themes include upskilling, reskilling, change management, training and development, work design, competence management, career management, organizational citizenship behaviors, inclusive workplaces, leadership development, teamwork, emotional intelligence, and stress. Hence, the primary objective of the Human Resources Strategy & Organizational Development competence center is to enable effective, sustainable growth in organizations that exist in a world that now is volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA). To achieve this goal, the research line will develop high-quality, impactful research that creates the knowledge and infrastructures to leverage organizations’ ability to thrive in the complexity of twenty first century organizational ecosystems.

The research line adopts an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approach, through the integration of theoretical perspectives within HR Management, Organizational Behavior, Medicine, Human Factors, and Social Sciences more broadly.

Supportive and Transversal Research Lines

Strategic Design

This research line centers on Design for the business and strategy transversal competence and knowledge area. It will focus on building models, processes, and tools, based on design thinking, speculative design, and design science research to support all TRIE actions lines and competence centers.

The responsibility for transformation arises above all in the way education ecosystems are designed. Teaching models have an emerging additional responsibility to help young people develop projective skills, to master more exploratory paths of knowledge, with greater purposes, with a focus on evolving individual perception towards a more collective and social awareness and responsibility. Even if their vision lacks an altruistic conscience, it is necessary to challenge all agents of the education ecosystem in favor of the relevance that these skills have for a different future. In different areas, particularly in functional creative areas, where it is essential to challenge young people to transform their conventional vision, focused on the commercial aspects of the product, to the transformational and transdisciplinary dimension. Contemporary architecture and design already incorporate issues of conceptualization of space, interaction, sustainability, agents and consequences; however, it is necessary that the creative industries promote methods that disseminate a new vision. It is no longer enough to think about the future, changing the behaviors of today, for tomorrow. The “Future, Critical and Speculative Design” Dimension has resized this reflection, bringing fictional narratives that explore utopian scenarios or dystopian scenarios that build undesirable societies. The Inverse Futures competence center aims to explore these domains, reversing the existing process of innovation, deconstructing discourses, and exploring the positivist dimension of speculative futures.

Responsibility, Sustainability & Circularity

The consequences of accelerated global warming, the historically unique depletion of resources and the increasing destruction of entire ecosystems have become the focus of discussion among top executives in many companies. Studies on business administration and management practices have long neglected the negative effects of business activities on the environment, leaving the solution in the hands of political or social players. Yet, increasing awareness among consumers and the society as a whole, alarming price fluctuations, and the scarcity of raw materials as well as adaptable laws have resulted in businesses and their value-added chains coming increasingly under pressure. Conversely, business sustainability can offer a strategic competitive advantage and spectacular development potential. Our Center aims to support companies on the needed transformation of Leadership, higher purpose and strategic sustainability driven. From “Green Wash to Positive Impact” centered business organizations.