Casa Mendes Gonçalves, OLI e Sugal are the three new partners at Católica International Business Platform for 2025-2028, joining the founding businesses Grupo Nabeiro, Sumol+Compal e Tecnimede.
Launched in 2021, the Católica International Business Platform is an initiative of CATÓLICA-LISBON, which brings together Portuguese family businesses of great size and international projection that want to accelerate growth in new markets, create value in a sustainable way and become multinationals of reference in the global market.
‘We can only grow if we can work together transparently and critically,’ emphasised the President of the Universidade Católica Portuguesa (UCP), Isabel Capeloa Gil, at the signing ceremony for the accession protocols, referring to ‘the University's willingness to support the development of companies’. Through this platform, the aim is to ‘work on the ground with companies, boosting economic growth, developing governance models and improving the structure, capacity and competitiveness of the Portuguese business fabric’, she emphasised.
Bringing together leaders committed to developing collaborative dynamics, sharing learning, co-creating solutions and exploring investment synergies, the Platform has a long reach, facilitated by the Universidade Católica Portuguesa through its national network of faculties, schools and institutes, the more than 170 Catholic universities in the world, and strategic partnerships, for example with the Portuguese Chamber of Commerce and Industry and COTEC.
‘Our commitment for 2025-2028 has three points: to support partners in building capacity at a high level to accelerate sustained international growth and value creation; to promote the identification of synergies so that they can collaborate with each other and move from idealisation to practice; to facilitate the sharing of knowledge to strengthen the intelligence system of companies, because the generation of knowledge is what we can give to the business community,’ said Miguel Athayde Marques, vice-rector of UCP and co-founder of the Platform.
Margarida Ramalho, also a co-founder and lecturer at CATÓLICA-LISBON, explained the innovative way to operationalise the commitment. With the creation of high-level reflection communities, ‘we're going to streamline the teams, which is nothing more than bringing the parties together around a common purpose, getting everyone to speak the same language and designing the co-creation challenges,’ she stressed, adding that the Platform promotes the endogenisation of knowledge, ensures the curation of content for high-level debate, and monitors experimentation through the case method.
