Nova SBE: Blueprint or Exception?

Portugal rarely produces institutions that compete near the top of global rankings. Nova School of Business and Economics is one of the exceptions. Within Universidade Nova de Lisboa, it has become the clearest expression of anambition present from the start: to look outward, import standards from abroad and refuse the limits imposed by geography or habit. The harder question is whether Nova SBE is a model others can copy, or an exception produced by favorable conditions. 

Universidade Nova de Lisboa was founded on August 11th 1973, still during the Estado Novo regime and less than a year beforeits collapse. It was part of the higher-education reforms advanced by José Veiga Simão, which also created institutions such as the University of Aveiro. For a university barely five decades old, Nova hasbuilt a reputation disproportionate to its age. Much of its Founding Committee and early faculty had trained abroad, making it lesscaptive to Portuguese academic habits and hierarchies.

The Faculty of Economics gave that ambition an early form. In September 1980, it launched Portugal’s first MBA, with the backingof Wharton. For a university not yet a decade old, in a country whose economy was only beginning to liberalise, this was arevealing move: the school intended to matter outside the classroom.

Nova SBE is now the most visible expression of that original Nova project. Its ascent is less a departure from the university’sfounding culture than an amplification of it. The school has become Nova’s most internationally recognised unit, with strong rankings, rising demand for its master’s programmes and membership in networks such as CEMS. Its Master’s in Finance and Master’s in Management are ranked 6th and 4th in the world respectively. These achievements reflect a long preference for international comparison over local comfort. 

But success stories are dangerous templates. What looks like a blueprint may depend on conditions that cannot easily be reproduced: a young institution, international founders, risk-taking leadership, private support, a favorable location and the freedom to build habits before bureaucracy hardened around them. Nova SBE’s rise is impressive not only because it succeeded, but because the circumstances that made it possible are hard to manufacture. 

That outward-looking instinct also shaped the Carcavelos campus. Led by Professor Pedro Santa Clara, who had returned from UCLA, the project drew on a Californian view of academic life, where environment, quality of life and intellectual ambition reinforce one another. The campus was financed almost entirely throughprivate donations, with the Municipality of Cascais providing the land. It showed that a public academic institution could mobilise private capital around a credible vision. Nova SBE was presenting itself not as a local business school with international aspirations, but as an international school in Portugal.

The same logic is visible in the classroom. Companies are unusually present in the school’s academic life, through recruitment events, guest lectures, applied electives and faculty drawn from business practice. Paulo Portas teaches geopolitics; António Bernardo teaches strategy; a private-equity elective is taught by a founder of one of Portugal's largest private equity funds and the CEO of Sonae Sierra. This proximity to the corporate world is not ornamental. It is partof the school’s operating model.

That alignment matters. The same choices that improve employability also improve rankings, creating a rare overlap between institutional ambition and student value. The curriculum bends toward practice without abandoning academic discipline. In a sector where rankings can sometimes reward appearances more than substance, NovaSBE has made institutional self-interest and educational quality point in the same direction.

The campus, international hiring, resistance to academic endogamy, private partnerships and foreign-trained faculty are notseparate facts. They are parts of the same institutional pattern. Nova SBE has benefited from treating Portugal not as a ceiling, but as a base. There are few fields, football aside, in which a Portuguese institution competes near the top of a global market. 

Yet this is where replication becomes harder. Institutions such as Instituto Superior Técnico have extraordinary student talent and deep technical credibility. But talent alone does not produce strategic agility. Older institutions oftencarry governance structures, state dependencies and inertia that make rapid reinvention difficult. 

Nova SBE proves that Portuguese higher education is not condemned to provincialism. It shows that international excellence can be pursued from Portugal rather than after leaving it. It also suggests that governance, culture andimagination matter as much as funding or student quality. A blueprint can be copied; an exception can only be admired. Nova SBE remains somewhere between the two.

I would like to extend a large thanks to Professor Pedro Santa Clara, who knows the Nova SBE project better than anyone else,led it, and fought for it. A conversation with him was invaluable in shaping my understanding of the university and its history.