This study was developed under the scope of a Portuguese project focused on the entrepreneur’s perspective and perception on the internationalization process of his company: more specifically, about the factors that enhanced the company entry into foreign markets as well as the constraints found in this process. This work focuses on the importance of using digital transformation to integrate technological tools in international business practice and strategy and the obstacles encountered with introducing these new technologies. This study aims to determine the relationships between technology categories and obstacles. The final goal is to assess the impact of these characteristics of the companies by the sector of economic activity, size, and percentage of profits resulting from international expansion. A questionnaire was designed and sent by email to 8183 companies from the AICEP database, distributed by three main activity sectors. A total of 310 valid answers were gathered from the Portuguese internationalized companies. The research limitations are related to the reduced number of interviews. These interviews showed that managers were not aware of the concept of digital transformation and misunderstood the use of digital technologies in the internationalization process of the business. This limitation can add some bias to the qualitative results. In addition to these limitations, the number of responses per sector was also not homogeneous. The practical implications of this study are that managers and top-level executives can use that to better understand how companies could use digital tools and what obstacles they should avoid when they want to internationalize their business. This paper is one of the first research contributions to analyze the impact of digital transformation in the internalization of Portuguese companies.

Due to the global pandemic (COVID-19) currently facing humanity, a new environment that promotes teaching–learning is now emerging. This environment that challenges traditional teaching practices created an opportunity for the technology industry to capitalize on by developing creative e-learning platforms that empowers the teaching–learning process, during this ‘emergency’ situation. E-learning scenario is an important element to be considered, as it offers a host of benefits, such as reducing costs, allowing for education on-demand, etc., to its adopters. However, the application of this could bring some challenges, as some of the existing online platforms are not conducive to support clear communication among academic staff. This paper describes a report identifying the main problems faced by teachers and students from different countries in Latin America, when using e-learning platforms in a lockdown scenario, reporting the importance to include aspects related with emotions and awareness.

The current technological evolution allows us to easily and quickly obtain more information, computing capacity, communication and connectivity, in addition to allowing new forms of collaboration between disperse networks of diversified actors. This new reality not only offers enormous potential for innovation and enhanced performance for organizations but also, extends beyond the classic boundaries to affect individuals, other organizations and society in general. At the same time, this reality makes the ability of organizations to uphold their competitive advantage more challenging, since the control of the elements of their operating environment decreases drastically as they increasingly control the elements of the same environment. This is how the digital transformation of organizations becomes unavoidable, because otherwise they tend to disappear. In this context, it is necessary to infer our students’ methods for researching, identifying and taking solutions about if organizations in Portugal are already living the aforementioned digital transformation or if they are aware of the need to adapt to this new reality. The main goal of this research formatted as educational approach, is to evaluate and compare the current state of digital adoption in terms of the preparation according to the prevailing technological categories (pillars and innovation accelerators), as well as future priorities of organizations in the implementation of digital transformation in Portuguese organizations. To evaluate such objectives, a Project Based Learning (PBL) approach was used to reinforce the research and decision-making skills of undergraduate business students. Based on the results obtained, it can be concluded that organizations are aware of the need to accommodate the digital transformation not to fail and disappearing. However, it is not possible to conclude which strategy is to be adopted by the organizations, and how such a strategy will affect the organization as a whole, in particular as in respect of its business model.

The renewal imposed by the Eurocodes regarding the methodologies of safety evaluation requires a statistical analysis of the variability of ground geotechnical parameters. However, the studies published in the reviewed literature do not cover the typical materials from the northeast region of Portugal—residual soils from granite—to which a strong heterogeneity is associated. Hence, a statistical characterization of the natural variability of a granite residual soil from Porto has been made through a significant amount of experimental tests, focusing on its geomechanical properties. In order to provide a database for probabilistic analysis of problems involving this type of soils, an appropriate statistical law has been used to model its variability, which has been quantified by means of coefficients of variation and scales of fluctuation.