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2022 ZIBS Forum, on the theme of "Redefining the Triple Helix: Technology, Business, and Education in Digital Era", was successfully held on 5 Jan. Scholars and subject-matter specialists presented their recent research findings on digital technology, innovation management, corporate strategy and sustainable development besides other fields of business studies. This yearly event aims to engage, inspire, and intrigue young students to reflect deeply on how technology, business, and education can foster significant advances in the digital world and help usher new breakthroughs that address the pressing challenges. ZIBS Dean, BEN Shenglin attended the forum and delivered a welcome speech. Professor CHIU Tzu-Kuan from Shanghai Advanced Institute of Finance of Shanghai Jiao Tong University delivered the keynote speech. Young faculty from ZIBS also shared their recent academic achievements.
Leaders from 14 business schools across the world gathered online to reimagine the future of business schools and to meet the needs in the real business world by integrating business schools with STEM research. The forum was chaired by ZIBS Associate Professor WANG Cheng and Professor WEN Wu.
In his welcome address, Prof. BEN Shenglin, Dean ZIBS, noted that ZIBS places a significant emphasis on developing and nurturing young talent with a strategy to create a strong connection between business school, industry and Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM).
Part I
Keynote Speech
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Professor CHIU Tzu-Kuan delivered a comprehensive speech on "Green Finance and Sustainable Development". She highlighted that green finance is goal-oriented and its investment transforms from two dimensions to three dimensions which are risk, return, and ESG impact. She further outlined three major challenges being faced by green finance: high threshold for investors to take initiative, unclear relationship between investment return and impact, and the difficult access to ESG data. While facing these three challenges, scholars, she mentioned, have achieved four goals: impact-weighted accounts, cultivating investors’ preference for ESG, progress in 3D investment theory and including green information in the investment report.
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Insights on "Critical Actors to Sustain eSports Industry in China" were presented lucidly by ZJU Hundred Talent Program Young Professor ZHAO Yupei. She introduced the concept and attributes of eSports and the rise of platformalization of eSports in China based on regulatory platformization of infrastructures and the growth of the value chain and multisided platforms. She also pointed out the three main factors which are driving the China's eSports industry successfully.
Part II
The Integration of Academia and Industry in the New Business Era
The second part of the forum revolved around the integration of academia and industry in the new business era. In this session, ZIBS young professors and post-doctoral fellows exchanged their practice-oriented research findings.
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Subscription, a business model in which customers pay a recurring fee at regular intervals, has experienced tremendous growth over the past decade, especially in the consumer service and retail sectors. Assistant Professor WANG Yiwei shows that customer email engagement is a double-edged sword in the subscription space: it increases both customer retention and service consumption, and it may decrease profitability when the increased operating cost to serve retained customers outweighs the benefit of customer retention.
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ZIBS Assistant Professor LUO Lingli presented her work entitled "cluster status and new venture creation". By uniquely focusing on the social status of industrial clusters, Prof. Luo’s work is mainly based on a sample of township industrial clusters specialized in manufacturing industries in Guangdong Province. She also delineated the concepts of cluster status, cluster status spillovers and lucidly explained how these new drivers can contribute to the creation of regional entrepreneurship.
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As part of corporate social responsibility, social goals such as rural revitalization, ESG evaluation system, and green economy have attracted scholarly attention in business studies, albeit recently. ZIBS Assistant Professor Jiajia Lim in the forum proposed the strategy-structure-performance (SSP) framework to explore how proactive social strategy can motivate firms to collaborate with suppliers on social sustainability initiatives, and how such collaboration can ensure a win-win opportunity for both noneconomic (social performance) and economic (operational performance) performance.
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Innovation and entrepreneurship are central to any business school pedagogy. To nurture a robust innovation culture, business schools have to play an important role. Against this backdrop, ZIBS Post-doctoral Fellow LIANG Tian gave a talk titled as "The behavioral theory of entrepreneurial universities: the antecedent and contingency of slack-rich entrepreneurship". She explained in detail how universities can nurture their entrepreneurial behavior in the transmission and entrepreneurial paradigm, especially at the decision-making level.
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Assistant Professor LEI Linan of ZIBS gave a presentation on ZIBS 2022 research and academic accomplishments. She informed the audience about the research progress achieved by ZIBS in the past year in the form of published papers, books, sponsored projects and academic rewards. In her presentation she mentioned about the ZIBS focus areas which include fintech, big data and innovation management.
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Another ZIBS Professor and Director of International Research Center for Fintech Security, WEN Wu delivered a presentation about the center’s accomplishment. He talked about international cooperation, research and publication and social and public service of CBDC.
Part III
University-industry Collaboration and Commercialization
Continuing with its unique tradition, the forum this year again presented ZIBS flagship research products which include various indexes and country reports.
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For instance, in collaboration with All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce and the provincial federations, ZIBS came up with its flagship research on the Internationalization Index of Chinese POEs. This index system, formulated by ZIBS Associate Professor WAN Feng, aims to enable policy makers to get a deeper understanding of internationalization of Chinese POEs and develop more effective policies to engage these enterprises in national strategies such as BRI as a potential driver of growth.
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Another pioneering index presented this year is Early Risk Warning System for Outward Chinese POEs led by ZIBS Post-doctoral Fellow ZHOU Dong and Assistant Professor WANG Yiwei. This unique work is based on the construction of risk rating index system, which provides insight into risk identification and loss assessment in international trades and investments by taking economic, political, and social factors into consideration. Sub-project of the convoy system for Zhejiang POEs going global in cooperation with Zhejiang Federation of Industry and Commerce is studied in this work.
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Since 2015, the International Finance Research Office of Academy of Internet Finance annually launches the "Bank Internationalization Index (BII)". This research program conducts a systematic study on the internationalization development of more than 100 banks around the world. And helps banks and other financial entities to fully understand their development status and aids them to formulate robust internationalization development strategies. In the forum, ZIBS Assistant Professor LI Yuanqi launched the 8th report entitled "To be good at thinking, in order to have better development".
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Another new initiative of ZIBS and applauded by the audience was the launching of ZIBS Doctoral Student Forum in tandem with International Campus, ZJU. As a valuable addition to various ZIBS academic forums, the cohort of researchers aims to drive interdisciplinary research exchanges.
The academic marathon at ZIBS ended by the Second Global Deans’ Forum. Deans from 14 business schools of 11 countries gathered online to exchanges views and ideas about the possibility of integrating STEM research with the business studies in order to effectively meet the emerging planetary challenges. The panel discussion was chaired by ZIBS Professor WEN Wu. Questions related to talent cultivation, government policies, school position, international cooperation and geopolitical circumstances were debated and discussed.
More detailed reviews of the forum are coming soon!
