Business plan: animal assisted therapy in Portugal

• Autor(a) principal: Rebelo, Joana Isabel Afonso Covas Torres
• Data de Publicação: 2017
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/17153
• topic: Animal Assisted Therapy; Business Plan; Health; Human-Animal Interactions; Plano de negócio; Relação humano-animal; Reabilitação; Bem-estar; Promoção da saúde; Gestão de projetos

Health is central to human well-being and can be quite crucial to economic progress since healthy populations live longer and are more productive. With a rise in average life expectancy, it is necessary to develop the means required to maintain people healthy for longer and improve life-quality. Animal Assisted Interventions are proven to be one method to improve health, help in the rehabilitation process and enhance diseases' prevention. This work aims to discover and sense why AAI companies in Portugal struggle to strive in the business world and how it is possible to overcome those obstacles. The proposed Business Model for CTAR – Centro de Terapia Assistida e Reabilitação Animal – strives to be innovative and bring new ideas capable of underpinning the existing associations in several fields such as AAI Research, Market Analysis, Operations, Marketing, and Finance. This thesis presents one proposal for Operations and Marketing components and three alternative financial models to reach economic viability. The first model shows an approach of lower investment and operating costs, the third model shows a methodology with a long run view assuming a higher investment and long term perspectives and the second, a hybrid strategy that combines models 1 and 3, and presents the less sustainable case. The business model developed proves the sustainability and improvement of the Animal Assisted Intervention Center economic viability and simultaneously the improvements in people's health, happiness, and life-quality for any medical condition.