INTERVIEW
International Business School, Suzhou at XJTLU, won the 2022 AMBA & BGA Excellence Award for Best CSR and Sustainability Initiative for its campaign ‘15 Ways in 15 Weeks’. This was a semester-long initiative, divided into weekly campaigns, that drove sustainable, positive behavioural change at the International Business School Suzhou. Each week, themed activities and events took place on topics relating to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs), such as waste management, sustainable transportation and ethical finance. The initiative resulted in the establishment of a Sustainable Future Talents student association as well as ¥13,000 RMB in charitable donations, and hundreds of healthier choices. For faculty, staff, and students, it also led to positive life changes individuals must make to achieve the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Ambition spoke to Ellen Touchstone, Associate Dean for Responsible and Sustainable Business Education at the International Business School Suzhou, to discuss this initiative – as well as the School’s other innovations and achievements, its plans for the future, and Touchstone’s thoughts on the opportunities for business education. Thank you for speaking to Ambition and sharing your views with us. To start, could you tell us about your role, and what it involves? I’m the inaugural Associate Dean for
XJTLU is a joint venture between Xi’an Jiaotong University in China and the University of Liverpool in the UK which began in 2006. As an independent Sino-foreign co-operative university, XJTLU is the first and only of its kind approved by the Ministry of Education. IBSS is growing in size and influence in pursuit of its vision to be a leading international Business School. The School’s six core values – Inquisitive, Mindful, Professional, Adaptive, Collaborative and Transformative (IMPACT) – represent IBSS’s positive impact on society through teaching, research, and business engagement. IBSS became the youngest School to be accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) in 2016, and the youngest to receive EQUIS accreditation in 2018. In 2020, IBSS received joint accreditation from AMBA & BGA. As a result, IBSS officially became the world’s 103rd triple- accredited Business School by AACSB, EQUIS, and AMBA. Our five departments of Accounting, Economics, Finance, Intelligent Operations and Marketing, and Strategic Management and Organisations have 150-plus faculty or teaching staff members who teach some 4,000 students from 60 countries. Diverse faculty include top researchers and experienced corporate professionals. With English as the language of instruction, IBSS delivers a range of undergraduate, postgraduate and executive education programmes
Responsible and Sustainable Business Education (RSBE) at IBSS @XJTLU, where I lead our sustainability team to integrate ERS (ethics, responsibility and sustainability) into the curriculum, and into our daily lives as ‘IBSSers’. The IBSS Sustainability Committee comprises representatives from our five departments, two student groups who focus on this area, Oikos and the Sustainable Future Talents, and the directors of our Centre for Responsible and Sustainable Business Education, CAO Xuanwei and the W.E. leader Mindfulness Centre, PAN Li (Sunny). In Greater China, IBSS acts as a model for RSBE, having been named a Regional Centre of Expertise by the United Nations University in January 2022, and having signed on as a Signatory to the UN-supported Principles of Responsible Management Education (PRME) in 2013, as well as being an Advanced Signatory since 2018. This role provides many opportunities for collaboration with companies, NGOs, community members, other Chinese Business Schools, and the government, in order to be as impactful as possible. International Business School Suzhou is part of Xi’an Jiaotong- Liverpool University and offers a blend of Western and Chinese academic practices. This makes the School unique in the business education space. Can you tell us about the School, its mission and its values?
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