Aims: The goals of the doctoral programme in Business Management are: to train specialised researchers in Business Management with the essential knowledge and skills to carry on high quality research; to transmit the attitudes and values of the research staff; to provide students with the relations and resources to stimulate, improve or build their skills to students; and to link research to the companies of the socio-economic environment.

Description: The first doctoral programme in Business Management was offered by the Department of Business Management of the University of Valencia at the end of the 1980s, being one of the first doctoral programmes specialised in the area of Business Organisation in Spain. Since then, numerous improvements have been gradually introduced which have led to the current doctoral programme, more than 30 years later. The result of this programme is the training of more than 130 doctors, 15 Doctoral Studies special awards and 17 “European Doctoral Studies” awards, most of which have been incorporated into the university teaching staff, both in national and foreign universities. The programme presented has received several Quality Awards and Excellence Awards during the academic years 11/12, 12/13 and 13/14. It also has an attractive programme adapted to current and common research topics in any country (internationalisation, cooperation, innovation, entrepreneurship, etc.) and a large teaching team, committed to research and able to adapt to cultural differences. All of this has enable the internationalisation of this doctoral programme which, in fact, has been taught in Spain, twice in Costa Rica (in collaboration with the four Costa Rican public universities), and twice in Colombia (in collaboration with the ICESI University). This process of internationalisation has clearly had a positive impact on the programme because ,on the one hand, it has resulted in a substantial improvement in the quality of the teaching staff (motivation, experience with other cultures, dynamism, international collaboration, etc); in addition to an international positioning of the department, an improved image of the Spanish University and Spain as a country committed to the development of Latin America; encouragement of high-quality research in the area of Business Management, providing relationships and resources to stimulate and improve the skills of Latin American faculty; the contribution to improving the competitiveness of the socio-economic environment of the target countries through the interaction and transfer of results between research and practice in business management and, finally, the creation in the medium term of research platforms in the destination countries.