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Best Thesis Award In Advances in Intelligence & Data For Industry is the international award category that Juliana Salvadorinho adds to her academic career. This award is the result of his master’s dissertation, presented in 2020, which obtained the maximum grade of 20. The student returned two years later to present her dissertation at the International Conference on Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Marketing and Consumer Behaviour 2022 and the prize she won is proof that the grade was well deserved.

“The excess of data that often remains without any added value, because it is not collected and analyzed” represents “one of the biggest problems that organizations reveal when inserting a digital strategy,” explains Juliana Salvadorinho. It was with this problem in mind that the student of Industrial Engineering and Management prepared her master’s thesis, in collaboration with the company OLI – Sistemas Sanitários, and under the supervision of Professor Leonor Teixeira.

With the theme “Information systems in Industry 4.0: mechanisms to support the transfer of data to knowledge in lean environments”, Juliana explains that the main contribution of this work was the creation of a “roadmap that companies must adopt for a successful digital strategy, where data gains the format of knowledge.” The importance of his work lies in the need to develop “knowledge management” strategies in such a volatile paradigm as Industry 4.0. Employee turnover in companies is increasing and “as people leave companies, knowledge is also lost”, explains Juliana. “Creating competitive advantage” was the objective of the student’s work.

A long journey

Regarding the awards, Juliana says they are “the validation of the best she has to offer,” doing justice to her “constant resilience in embracing excellence,” characteristics necessary for those who live in the academic world.

This is the second award to come from his master’s thesis, after she won first place in a Competition belonging to the 5th North American International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Operations Management (IEOM). But these awards are nothing new in Juliana’s life, and in her resume she has more than 18 awards, ranging from awards for her academic merit, one of them given by the University of Aveiro as the best final-year student in 2021, to awards in other international conferences.

Her passion for Academia and desire to have a positive impact on the organizational environment gave her the motivation to continue the work she started in her master’s degree and go on to her doctorate. In this adventure she once again brings along her teacher Leonor Teixeira, with whom she says she makes “a fantastic team” and to whom she owes the consistent path she has taken so far.

Her doctoral thesis is funded by the Foundation for Science and Technology and her work is related to the creation of strategies “that mitigate the turnover problem and the loss of organizational knowledge capital”. The collaboration with the Augmanty project allows her to test in real context the difficulties of the business environment, through OLI – Sistemas Sanitários, IKEA Industry and Bosch Thermotechnology.

As for future awards, the student says that “the best award you can have is to contribute enough to put people at the center of technological innovation.”