Vlerick is ready for the Chinese experience
14 Mar 2008In October 2008 Vlerick Leuven Gent Management School will be launching a full-time and a part-time international English-language MBA at Peking University. Following on from Russia, this initiative in China is an important new step for the School. The concept is to design a China based international MBA aimed at both future Chinese global business leaders and young international business leaders who realise the imperative of having a comprehensive understanding of China, its business culture and its place as an economic powerhouse for the 21 Century.
The BiMBA programme was established in 1998 as a joint venture between a consortium of American business schools and CCER (an academic research centre that advises government and business on the potential and future development of the Chinese economy). Near the end of this ten-year agreement, CCER started looking for a new suitable partner. The increasingly successful global profile of Vlerick Leuven Gent Management School led them to Belgium. After some 18 months of negotiations, Peking University felt fully convinced of Vlerick’s overall quality and invited the School to deliver a full-time and a part-time international MBA programme.
Chinese MBA with global dimension
Emerging economies like China, Russia, Brazil and India are going to be the drivers of the 21st century economy. A lot of European companies want to do business with China, but Chinese culture is so different that anyone needs explicit knowledge, experience and guidance. So the obvious course of action for Vlerick is to seek alliances in those countries. This strategy has formed the basis of alliances that open up markets in both directions, for European export firms to develop business in other countries and for individuals in other countries to enjoy a high-quality management education.
It is very important to recognise the Chinese dimension in the programme. Vlerick will lead a programme based on the key competences of a Chinese MBA programme. It is not our Vlerick MBA that we are exporting to China. It is designed to be an attractive high-quality Chinese MBA for a global market. Our ambition is to learn from this experience. A growing, emerging economy offers an enormous learning resource for the rest of the world, and also for us as a business school. It would be unwise to think that we are on top of things and should export our knowledge and our model. It is a mutual learning experience.
Blind spot in research
In addition to education, research is the second key element of the partnership with Peking University, with the alliance offering unique opportunities in this area. For the past 20 years the Chinese economy has enjoyed compound growth rates of 9 to 10 percent, but there’s actually very little research into how the economy has expanded and how this growth has been achieved. There’s a lot of ignorance on the part of western business about where the opportunities lie and how to properly take advantage of them for mutual benefit. We want to initiate research on those topics and see case studies that reflect on Chinese business, on European business operating in China, and on Chinese business operating outside China.
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