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BGA | BUSINESS IMPACT
Mall Online’s free courses seek to provide this. ASU Thunderbird School of Global Management just announced its 100 Million Learners’ Global Initiative, which will provide a series of five online courses on international management and entrepreneurship in 40 languages, available for free, which could be positively transformational. What innovations in business education have inspired your most over the past 18 months? Sometimes, it’s the simplest innovations that can make the most difference. For example, before the pandemic, I would invite guest speakers from industry to come to my classes, which usually involved a lot of planning, expense and travel time across Suzhou or down from Shanghai. Now that we are all skilled at using the various online meeting platforms, I can invite more speakers from around the globe to present virtually to my classes which makes it a much easier ask for me and a much easier task for them. What are the biggest challenges facing international Business Schools over the coming 18 months? Just when we think that there’s an end to the pandemic, our world just keeps on getting more complicated. From my perspective, I think we will still face significant challenges in international travel, which impacts student enrolment as well as faculty and staff hiring and retention. I know that many Business Schools have faced budget cuts because of the pandemic which is always difficult in terms of operations and morale. I think, though, that there is a huge opportunity to take the momentum and lessons from the pandemic about pivoting quickly, assessing the situation, and changing direction, and apply them to the climate emergency, and other natural or human-caused disasters. Before the pandemic, there just wasn’t a real sense of urgency to solve the ‘wicked’ problems associated with the SDGs. I want us to take the confidence we earned from our experiences with the pandemic over the past two years to take bold steps in this direction.
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What are the next steps for yourself as a Business School leader?
I want to fight the good fight for the stakeholders who haven’t been heard above the cries for ‘shareholder wealth’. I will also continue to work for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI). For the past three years, I’ve been working with the Ladies who Tech organisation in Shanghai to encourage more women and girls to choose STEAM careers. Until we have more diversity in product development, the needs of certain segments of the population will remain unmet. Last year, some of our female students felt passionately about the issue of period poverty and menstrual shame, so I connected them to a sustainable period product company in Hong Kong – Luüna – led by a dynamic female founder, Olivia Cotes-James. Together, we were able to raise funds to send period products to teenagers in need in Guangxi, a poorer region in China. I also want to encourage my colleagues and students across the university to engage in more applied research, such as the Solar Decathlon China competition in which IBSS is involved along with the XJTLU Design School, School of Advanced Technology, and School of Science. There are myriad complex societal issues which need to be studied on an interdisciplinary basis to find feasible solutions. Business Schools should
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