The creation of a network, in the North of Portugal, as an opportunity for territorial sustainability

This article intends to demonstrate that, in the North of Portugal, the creation of a business network can become an opportunity to achieve territorial sustainability.The development of a territorial business network system can be crucial to stimulate local development, in the sense that it represents an opportunity to favor and encourage investments. This strategy, in addition to contributing to the dynamization of the productive activities involved, will make it possible to trigger new partnerships, which may be an opportunity to develop and share resources, processes, knowledge and innovation among the intervening parties.The territory of the North of Portugal is mainly characterized by small and medium-sized companies and, according to data from the National Institute of Statistics, in the study carried out in 2008 on the structures of Portuguese companies, “there were 349,756 micro, small and medium-sized companies (SMEs) in Portugal", taking into account that the North region had 113,747 companies, influencing the region's turnover by 69.5%.With this study, the authors intend to demonstrate that in the North of Portugal, the implementation of a design-oriented territorial network strategy can be crucial to achieving territorial sustainability (Costa, F.; Soares, L.; Aparo, E., 2022) to define the evolution of the local economy. In this sense, it is intended to implement a business network system of contacts, through the business characterization of the territory under study, in this case, the North of Portugal, which promote innovation, design-driven innovation (Verganti, 2020), and are also a way of generating dynamism in productive activities, fostering sustainability and even their success or even survival. Based on localized excellence, a project built on a network can activate collaboration processes, boosting the productive capacity of each company, improving the offer and making processes and resources profitable.