Vitor Braga

Vitor Braga is an Associate Professor at the School of Technology and Management (ESTG) – Porto Polytechnic (IPP) and a founding member of the Centre for Innovation and Research in Business Sciences and Information Systems (CIICESI).
At the moment, I am the Director of the Business Sciences Department and the Director of CIICESI. My academic background lies in the intersection between economics, business and entrepreneurial processes. I have a bachelor degree in Economics (1999), a Master of Science in Industrial Economics (2002), and a Ph.D. in Business Sciences (2008) from Middlesex University - London, UK, where I also completed a PgCert in Research Methods.
In 1999, I joined the School of Technology and Management, as a founder staff member, allowing me to accompany its development since the first day. This process has been a challenge that allowed me to be involved with all new processes within ESTG, and to contribute to its development, definition of the strategy and the creation of the current staff team.
During my academic and scientific career, I have focused on different aspects of entrepreneurial processes, namely those related to entrepreneurial and social innovation, international entrepreneurship, family business entrepreneurship and inter-firm collaboration. These themes deserved both a qualitative and quantitative approach, to explore the phenomena from different perspectives.
In particular, I have been applying the foundations of Economic Geography to the study of different aspects of entrepreneurial behaviour, based on the assumption that incorporating insights from one discipline into the study of others (yet related) yields new ideas allowing an interdisciplinary approach. In addition, I have also been combining the foundations of the New Economic Geography and Institutional Economics to business aspects leading to increasing competitiveness of places and firms.
My scientific journey started to explore the agglomeration of economic activity and clusters. The following step was to examine the dynamics of entrepreneurial interaction within these clusters, and hence, my PhD topic explored the informal inter-firm relationships amongst SMEs within these clusters. One of the main unexpected outcomes of my PhD dissertation was the strong presence of family within business becoming one of key aspects of my subsequent research. As the entrepreneurial process was central to my research, entrepreneurship and its dimensions integrated the core of my research since then.
The location of CIICESI, in a highly industrialised area, where specialisation of production occurs around small but very close cities, my research has been able to be transferred to the community by means of my research findings. In some cases, I was also able to transfer such knowledge through projects with both locsal authorities and business associations.
My research has been based on a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, as means to triangulate the data, but more importantly, to offer a multi-perspective to the same research problems. More recently, I have been employing fuzzy-methods approaches that allow the transformation qualitative data to a more reduced and summarised set off findings.
In my editor roles, I have always sought for attracting similar methodological approaches, and to apply them to the evolutionary paradigms of real-world business, adapting my research to the evolving business environment processes. Therefore, the study of innovation processes was not only fundamental, but also the required evolution of my research to reply to the current existing challenges in the industry. Consequently, currently I have been incorporating both digitalisation and sustainability in the study of innovation and entrepreneurial processes.
My research has been able to the policy informative, but also produced outputs to the industry, which, in a different perspective are also crucial to be incorporated in the courses I teach. Moreover, I also believe that such a eclectic approach is an important aspect of the research team within CIICESI, where we are looking for inter-disciplinary approaches to topics that can be transferred to the industry. I have been developing efforts to inspire the team in both incorporating these combined topic and methodologies approach, and to encourage them to both individually and as a group to engage with industrial and international actors.