BGA | BUSINESS IMPACT
university. For example, last year we launched an artificial intelligence (AI) MBA. Think of this as an industry-based MBA programme in collaboration with the engineering school. ZW: Fan Wang is the Assistant President and Dean of the Business School at Sun Yat-sen University. Professor Wang, can you say a few words about Sun Yat-sen’s best practices? Fan Wang (FW): It is my pleasure to share something of the Business School at Sun Yat-sen University of Guangzhou in China. The Business School is a good example of how China opened up to the world in 1980. We [created our] Business School in 1985. In 1992, we launched our MBA programmes and, later, our EMBA programmes. Currently, we are the largest Business School providing MBA programmes in south China. The history of the MBA and EMBA programmes in my School is very interesting. In the beginning, we had very few students or faculty who could teach MBA and EMBA programmes. The feedback from the students was that they were not inspired by the teaching quality because we were considered too theoretical, so we [focused on developing] the faculty. Most of the faculty were from the bachelor’s, master’s, and PhD programmes, so maybe they [did not have] enough industry experience. So, we hired some people from industry to teach the MBA in the beginning. The Business School is not only for teaching, so research was very important for the School. Other Business Schools in China are similar. At that time, we followed the US model, and considered the publication of research to be the top priority of the Business School. We hired more talent from outside China so we could publish papers, and our research ranking improved. We also brought in new ideas from the US and Europe. At the time, the feedback from students was that we were pioneering. For the past 10 years, the School has focused on following global best practice and we consider it our mission to integrate the west and east. We ask each faculty member that, when they teach MBA or EMBA courses, they not only use the Harvard texts, but write
their own text so that we can do something more local. Our view is global, but we have a response that is local. In the future, we have to do something to align with the university strategy and, in some sense, help the university, so we have to consider how our strategy can align with that of the university. We have 11 hospitals [near the Business School]. and want to do something to help our healthcare industry because it’s a win-win strategy, so we have special programmes in healthcare and hospital management. At the same time, we have a supercomputing infrastructure in China, so we offer a special MBA track for ‘big data’ and supercomputing areas. Over the past five years, we have also been [developing courses] around the role the [Communist] Party [has] in business decision-making. This is a hot topic, considering Party development and enterprise, and we plan to continue to conduct projects in this area. In China, most students say that they don’t like online teaching and consider face-to-face teaching to be much better. So, for example, in our EMBA programmes, we’ve delivered three online courses since the beginning of the semester and during the early stages of the pandemic. But when students finished the online course and re-entered the campus for face-to- face teaching, they asked us to repeat the same courses [in a physical setting] with the same faculty, because they wanted to discuss them. We want to change the infrastructure of some of the classrooms because currently we deliver some of the intelligent [digital] classrooms in our building, so maybe we can [move towards] a hybrid model of teaching – especially for the MBA and EMBA. We want to do some more practice to see what the best way would be, going forward. ZW: Now let me welcome Jiang Wei, from the School of Management at Zhejiang University. Jiang Wei (JW): It is my pleasure to speak about the contribution and the best practices of Zhejiang University’s MBA programmes. Zhejiang University is one of the earliest providers of an MBA in China – [having launched its programme] 27 years ago.
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