The Value Creation Wheel (VCW) Lab at Nova SBE, Portugal

The Mission of the Nova School of Business and Economics (Nova SBE) in Portugal is to be a community dedicated to the development of talent and knowledge that impacts the world. According to the Financial Times, it is currently one of leading business schools in Europe being one of the TOP 20 in the World for different master’s degrees in management. Within this context, the vision of VCW Lab at Nova SBE is to have a positive impact in the world. This is done by supporting individuals, leaders, and their teams, who believe in the power of innovation and collective decision making (e.g., collective intelligence within their teams and stakeholders) to take optimal decisions and find sustainable solutions for their challenges. The mission of the VCW Lab is to help others to take better decisions, make the right decisions in the right manner. During the last two decades, the VCW Lab has developed and tests a wide range of VCW’s products/services, always supported by Research & Development (R&D), testing, go-to-market, commercialization, and sustainable sales. The VCW-Value Creation Wheel® (VCW) method (Lages, 2016, Lages et al. 2020) has been used by individuals and organizations which desire to make decisions to solve challenges supported by five pillars: 1) a sustainable approach, 2) common good, 3) collaboration, 4) wisdom, and 5) transparency. The final goal is to contribute to better innovation, decision making & sustainability, while constantly improving the VCW method.

The VCW Lab at Nova SBE was a recipient of over 1 Million€ in EU funds over the years. It has been working with all types of organizations, ranging from start-ups and NGOs to large organizations and Fortune 500 (e.g., Airbus, Credit Suisse, Mastercard, McDonalds, Thomson Reuters). It is currently involved in major H2020 projects (e.g., NextLand and NextOcean), which will help to address innovation, commercialization, and tech-transfer challenges in Agriculture/Forestry as well as Fishing/Aquaculture in the context of Space and Earth Observation. It has been applied in student projects by over 20 leading universities across the world (e.g., City University of Hong Kong, Marseille University, MIT, Korea University, Vienna University, Warwick University).

For a proper understanding of the VCW Lab at Nova SBE and the VCW method we recommend an in-depth examination of VCW method’s refereed publications (Lages, 2016, Lages et al. 2020), case-studies (e.g., Fonseca et al. 2018; Lages et al. 2018; Reis-Marques et al., 2019), the videos available at www.OpenVCW.com, and additional information at www.ValueCreationWheel.com .