Business pitching in the communication strategy of a product: a COIL project between Portugal and Brazil

Abstract

Business internationalisation, as a response to the challenge of globalisation, demands for effective and valuable communication, as well as the efficient use of transversal skills, to guarantee the competitive advantage of organisations. Given that the participation in international projects stands as added value for the democratisation of academic experiences, as well as an opportunity for the co-construction of knowledge, the present work is based on the development of a Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) project (in academic year 2021/2022), which was developed at Águeda School of Technology and Management of the University of Aveiro (ESTGA-UA, Portugal) and Centro Paula Souza of the Faculty of Technology of Guaratinguetá (FATEC, Brazil). This project aimed at promoting international learning experiences in the scope of two courses – “Oral and Written Expression Techniques” of the higher professional training course of SME Management (ESTGA-UA, Portugal) and “Business Communication” of the bachelor degree in Business Management Course (FATEC, Brazil). Students were asked to develop, in international teams, a business pitch for the business model defined, as well as for the new product, considering its internationalisation. The work was initially developed by the Brazilian students in the scope of a multidisciplinary project and the new products and areas of the different business models were defined based on a feasibility study for the Brazilian market. Based on the results, the participants in the COIL project carried out a market study for the Portuguese business context, aiming at the product’s/service’s future internationalisation. Thus, this COIL project was expected to promote the development of collaborative international learning processes, resorting to online communication tools, to enable students to: (i) identify and analyse the competitive advantages of the Portuguese and Brazilian markets in different business areas; (ii) communicate, with linguistic-discursive correction, integrating digital resources based on multimodal communication approaches; (iii) use different presentation techniques, oriented to the sociocultural characteristics of the target audience, thus creating business value. In this work, we intend to analyse the perceptions of students regarding the strengths and weaknesses of this type of international collaboration, with a special focus on the transversal competences most valued by the participants, in particular, given the challenging dynamics of collaborating within culturally and geographically different teams in online environment.