ASB Buzz – Page 4 – Asia School of Business

Kuala Lumpur, 29 August 2018 – Axiata Group Berhad (Axiata) partners with Asia School of Business (ASB) to host Data Unchained Malaysia 2018 with the aim is to help build capacity and talent in the field of data sciences and analytics. Data Unchained Malaysia 2018 is set to be Malaysia’s largest datathon and the first of a series of datathons Axiata plans to organize across its regional footprint in South and South East Asia.

As big data and data analytics become more integral as a tool to better understand customer needs and assist in business decision making, Axiata and ASB are looking to expose, nurture and develop a greater pool of specialists in this fast emerging area of expertise and skills required in an increasingly connected world. Data Unchained Malaysia 2018, designed as an intense weekend-long competition, is Axiata and ASB’s inaugural collaboration and is also intended to provide a platform for top Malaysian talent, data scientists and enthusiasts to show how their data-driven insights and business solutions can create real impact on the everyday lives of Malaysian citizens.

Considered a data-focused hackathon, the datathon will present participants with complex datasets and the challenge to develop models and insights over the weekend that lead to practical solutions which can impact real-life business. Participants will also have an enhanced experience from being mentored and guided by Axiata’s leading industry professionals who are part of Axiata’s very own analytics centre, providing a once in a lifetime experience for the participants. Dr Wijayasuriya, Axiata’s Corporate Executive Vice President and Regional CEO, said, “In our broader goal of Advancing Asia, we aim to bring together the best in the region in terms of innovation, connectivity and talent.

Through this datathon, we want to develop, harness and build a talent pool of Malaysian experts in data sciences as this is marked as a highly desired future profession for talent coming out of Asia. This also provides for an opportunity to imbue talents with similar passion for data in society and show the social impact that data-driven solutions can bring to Malaysia and the wider region.”

Building upon this, Pedro Uria Recio, head of Axiata Analytics Centre adds, “As one of Asia’s largest telecommunications groups and leading digital companies, Axiata has been a pioneer in the development and utilisation of data science and data storytelling to create a better customer experience and delivering better services to our over 350 million subscribers in 11 countries.”

Willem Smit, Professor of Marketing at the Asia School of Business and International Faculty Fellow at MIT, “The Asia School of Business has always aimed to create change-makers and we believe that this collaboration with Axiata contributes to that. The Data Unchained Malaysia 2018 datathon will be a great opportunity for talented minds to grow and highlight their capabilities to drive change in their society through data,” said Smit.

“As the unconventional and extraordinary students at the Asia School of Business, every semester we take on challenging and diverse projects across various industries involving huge data sets and are tasked to develop data-driven strategies. We feel that this datathon will enable us to derive better insights and come up with thought provoking solutions”, say Mounika Mydukur and Deepika Srinivas, Co-founders of Data Analytics Club at ASB. Google Malaysia, Ericsson (a network equipment manufacturer), TM Forum (a non-profit association of telecommunications companies) and Lynx Analytics (a consulting company focused on analytics) will also support the datathon.

Challenge Details

Data Unchained Malaysia 2018 is open to both students and working individuals. All backgrounds, from data scientists, programrs, graphic and interface designers, data journalists, data community activists, IT project managers and so on are welcome to participate. The datathon will kick-off on Friday, 2nd November 2018 with a preview into the data and a basic brief to prepare participants for the hack days to follow. The following two days, 3rd and 4th November 2018 will see the release of the complete data set and participants going into full gear as they flex their analytical muscles to develop their data-driven solutions.

The judging panel will then select the top 5 teams to pitch their ideas, after which 3 teams will be selected as winners. Axiata is offering RM30,000 worth of prizes, for its team and individual categories. Registrations for Data Unchained Malaysia open on 15th August 2018 and interested individuals can register at this link: www.axiata.com/dataunchained. For more information, please email dataunchained@axiata.com.

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About Axiata
Axiata is one of the leading telecommunications groups in Asia with approximately 350 million customers and with a presence in 11 countries. In pursuit of its vision to be the New Generation Digital Champion by 2021, the Group has transformed itself from a holding entity with a portfolio of pure-play mobile assets into a Triple Core Strategy driven business with the focus on Digital Telco, Digital Businesses and Infrastructure.

Within ASEAN and South Asia, Axiata has controlling stakes in market-leading mobile and fixed operators in the region including ‘Celcom’ in Malaysia, ‘XL’ in Indonesia, ‘Dialog’ in Sri Lanka, ‘Robi’ in Bangladesh, ‘Smart’ in Cambodia and ‘Ncell’ in Nepal. The Group also holds strategic interests in ‘Idea’ in India and ‘M1’ in Singapore. Axiata is in the cusp of transforming its mobile operations into Digital Telcos through digitisation and convergence.

‘edotco’, the Group’s infrastructure company, operates in six countries to deliver telecommunications infrastructure services, amassing approximately 27,500 towers. Presently the 12th largest independent tower companies globally, it aims to be one of the top regional telecommunications tower companies and is committed to responsible and sustainable business operations.

Axiata Digital and Axiata Business Services are the digital businesses arms of the Group. Together, these businesses are focused on capturing the rapid growth in digital financial services (‘Boost’), digital advertising (‘ada’), enterprise solutions/IoT (‘Xpand’) and platform services (‘APIgate’) with user access to global markets.
As a committed and long-term investor, Axiata provides employment to 25,000 people within its operations. In line with its sustainability goals, the Group actively supports and drives young talent development; disaster response and recovery; as well as green initiatives. Axiata’s broader goal Advancing Asia pieces together the best in the region in terms of innovation, connectivity and talent.

About Asia School of Business
Asia School of Business (ASB) was established in 2015 by Bank Negara Malaysia in collaboration with MIT Sloan Management to be a premier global business school, a knowledge and learning hub infused with regional expertise, insights and perspectives of Asia and the emerging economies. ASB is committed to developing transformative and principled leaders who will contribute towards advancing the emerging world.

ASB currently offers a full-time MBA degree as its flagship program as well as several non-degreed executive education programs. www.asb.edu.my

Around 100 academics from prestigious institutions from countries such as Hong Kong, United Kingdom and Japan came together for a three-day conference at Asia Business School from 16th to 18th of August 2018. This conference features discussion of papers and activities on the theme of ‘Innovation and Entrepreneurship: The Changing Frontier’. Notably, this year’s conference was also the first AIEA-NBER conference hosted in Southeast Asia after six years of collaboration between the two bodies.

The focal point of this conference series is on research in the economics and management of innovation and entrepreneurship while providing a forum bringing together leading scholars from both the US and Asia to enhance collaboration within the global research community. The sessions also emphasised the role of universities, especially on innovation and entrepreneurship in shaping economic prosperity.

In one of the sessions, PhD candidate Su Wang from the London School of Economics and Political Science discussed the Returns to Capital in Small and Medium Enterprises, basing the research on evidence from a UK Loan Guarantee Program. Among the facets of discussion was the returns to capital averaging at 35% per year yet that this is only representative of a very small fraction of eligible firms that increase investment in response to the loan guarantee program. 2.5% of small and medium enterprises in UK face financial constraints, and are open to using government-guaranteed loans to overcome such constraints.

This strongly rejects a common belief that any company would bend over backwards for public guarantees should they be offered, but suggests there is misallocation of capital in the UK economy. National University of Singapore’s Professor Changcheng Song presented his findings on the relationship between Workplace Flexibility and Entrepreneurship. Studying whether large-scale reform in Singapore that allows the possibility of business creation at one’s residential property spurs entrepreneurial activities, he found that the reform leads to a significantly higher level of business creation.

The reform also encourages entrepreneurs to become serial entrepreneurs, and they open a larger business with similar survival rate for their second firm. These results show that the home office scheme effectively spurs entrepreneurial activities and attract more entry into self-employment without significantly lowering the average quality of the pool.

The conference also included visits for the participants to three notable Malaysian organizations namely Malaysian Digital Economy Company, Top Glove and Catcha Group to give an insight on the numerous parts of the Malaysian economy, from a government-owned institution responsible for technology and commerce to one of the largest investors in the digital sector in emerging markets, notably ASEAN.

Photo Courtesy By: BERNAMA NEWS

KUALA LUMPUR, 18 JULY 2018 – Asia School of Business (ASB) held its first research workshop on refugee studies and forced migration in Southeast Asia with the support of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The research workshop was attended by 70 individuals including academics from Malaysia and Singapore who are involved in research surrounding forced migration, leaders of local NGOs who work with the refugee community, as well as members of the refugee community themselves.

The main goal of the workshop is to serve as a platform to connect local academics in hopes of expanding the body of ethical, well-informed and evidence-based academic literature surrounding refugee studies and migration in Southeast Asia. The workshop covered academic poster presentations and relevant issues such as navigating research ethics in diverse and dynamic refugee populations, as well as refugee healthcare.

Dr. Hartini Zainuddin, Child Activist and Founder of Yayasan Chow Kit and Voice of the Children, who spoke at the event expressed, “There is a huge gap at the grassroots level when it comes to proper documentation and research methods working towards advocacy and policy checking. Working with academics will contribute towards a solid evidence-based advocacy which will strengthen our lobbying for policy change.”

“Refugee children here may not have the access to formal education but there is still an opportunity to enjoy quality education. To improve refugee education, we have to start with teachers who are the strongest school-level predictor of student learning. An improvement in student learning creates educated and skilled refugees who will then become empowered to protect themselves, and to take care of their own needs during their stay here.

Teachers are agents of change”, said Ida Hariati Hashim, General Manager of Muslim Aid Education Fund, who spoke about the need to train teachers who teach refugee children in Malaysia. Melati Nungsari, Assistant Professor of Economics at ASB and the organiser of the event, highlighted the importance of producing high-quality research to support policy-making and the creation of impactful community interventions in this region. “The vast majority of academic work on refugee studies has been Euro-centric and has focused on the movements of refugees from the Middle East into Europe,” she stressed.

“The documentation of socio-economic conditions, challenges faced, and proposed solutions for refugee problems in the Southeast Asian region has not been tackled to the same extent. In Malaysia alone, we have more than 150,000 refugees registered with UNHCR. It is extremely important that we understand this population by conducting rigorous and ethical research in order to ensure policy-making or advocacy work done is relevant.”

ASB and UNHCR hope that this research workshop will be the first in an annual series of workshops to promote the academic work done on forced migration. At ASB, making an impact on society goes beyond developing talent for the corporate world and this initiative demonstrates ASB’s commitment to using its academic prowess to serve the community in need.

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About Asia School of Business
Asia School of Business (ASB0 was established in 2015 by Bank Negara Malaysia in collaboration with MIT Sloan Management to be a premier global business school, a knowledge and learning hub infused with regional expertise, insights and perspectives of Asia and the emerging economies. ASB is committed to develop transformative and principled leaders who will contribute towards advancing the emerging world.

For any enquiries, please contact our ASB representative:Teh Hui Yee, Director of Corporate Marketing (huiyee.teh@asb.edu.my)

Asia School of Business (ASB) returns to Cambridge with its second batch of MBA students for the four week-long Spring Immersion Program at MIT Sloan School of Management as part of the highlight of their six week US Trek program. The US Trek kicked off with 2 weeks of industry visits in San Francisco and New York before students headed over to Boston this week. The class of MBA 2019 visited some of the biggest names in the Silicon Valley such as Google, Facebook and Ideo and interacted with the vibrant business scene in New York as part of their program.

Commenting on the US trek so far, Abzal Raimkhanov, ASB MBA ’19, from Kazakhstan, says: “After visiting 3 major cities in the U.S, I can say that it has been an amazing experience. Ecosystems of education and businesses in both Silicon Valley and Cambridge stimulates innovation. This environment is designed to encourage all stakeholders to make the world a better place.” “As part of our desire to create a world-class school of management in Southeast Asia, it is important to bring our students back to the roots of which the school is built upon.

MIT Sloan’s acclaimed DNA of providing an outstanding education with a focus on entrepreneurship and innovation forms the bedrock of ASB’s unique value proposition,” said Charles Fine, founding President and Dean of ASB. ASB is a new global graduate business school in Kuala Lumpur, established by the Central Bank of Malaysia in collaboration with MIT Sloan School of Management in 2015. The school ASB is committed to develop transformative and principled leaders who will contribute towards advancing the emerging world through its extraordinary and unconventional program that has a strong emphasis on Action Learning in its curriculum, which is inspired by the ‘Mens et manus’, mind and hand.

Throughout the 20-months, the students are exposed to five Action Learning projects spanning across a diverse set of roles, industries and geographical locations. To date, the MBA 2019 students have worked with companies such as Esquel, BigC, Johnson & Johnson, Bangkok Bank, General Electric, Astro, Equatorial and Nestle, exposing the students to the rigor of MIT Sloan with hands on experiences in the emerging and rapidly dynamic business scene in Asia.

The MBA class of 2019 is comprised of 35 students from the U.S., Malaysia, Russia, Mexico, Zimbabwe, Taiwan, Brazil, Nigeria, Kazakhstan, Venezuela, Nigeria, India, Pakistan, Ghana, Turkmenistan, Denmark and Peru. “I have witnessed first-hand the power of immersing our students into Action Learning projects, where they are trained how to apply practice-oriented approach and management theories when solving real-life business problems,” adds Loredana Padurean, the Associate Dean of ASB.

As part of the four-week residential program at MIT Sloan, students will be attending lectures on, among others, System Dynamics, Pricing Strategy, Entrepreneurship, Negotiations and Sustainability taught by the Sloan faculty. “It’s interesting to see our case studies come to life in class,” says Marie Reine Seshie, from the class of ASB MBA 19’, who is from Ghana. “For most of our case studies, we have someone who can give us real life accounts from all over the world. The diversity of opinions, thoughts and questions are phenomenal.”

Natalia Tord, ASB MBA ’19, from Peru, adds: “I am grateful that ASB has given us the unique opportunity to see how industries operate in two of the most powerful cities in the world and understand them better. It has definitely been an unforgettable experience so far!” The arrival of the second cohort of ASB students in Cambridge is a testimony of the successful collaboration between Asia School of Business and MIT Sloan. This collaboration aims to enhance MIT Sloan’s presence in Asia and advance ASB’s mission to be pioneers of business innovation and entrepreneurship in this region.

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For any enquiries, please contact our ASB representative:Pek Ee Siew, Director of Marketing (eesiew.pek@asb.edu.my)

Asia School of Business’s (ASB) innovative curriculum and Malaysia’s experience in promoting an entrepreneurial ecosystem has led to the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Hanyang University of South Korea last Friday aimed at promoting further academic cooperation between both institutions and nations.

The Korean delegation was in Kuala Lumpur to attend a joint program with ASB titled “Management, Innovation and Entrepreneurship” from 1-3 March 2018. In order to expose students and faculty to high performing firms and universities, the Graduate School of Technology and Innovation Management at Hanyang University conducts an annual training program abroad that has seen the organization visit Stanford University, the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany and Cambridge University.

“The topic is about innovation policy and practices but every year we explore different ecosystems and regional particularities. This year, for the first time, we explored the ASEAN region and Malaysia. ASB’s curriculum and relationship with MIT Sloan School of Management was a natural partner for such a joint program,” explains Jieun Kim, chair of the department.

The program included visits to the Malaysian Global Innovation & Creativity Centre (MaGIC), iFlix and Catcha Group with lectures and workshops from both institutions that address design thinking principles and different aspects of innovation and entrepreneurship, including in supply chain, governance, data analytics and branding. There were also guest lectures by industry specialists, such as Ku Ko Peng, Executive Vice-President at PEMANDU Associates and Cha-ly Koh, CEO of Property Pricetag.

“We are impressed by the level of internationalization of Malaysian companies. Most are looking at the market beyond Malaysia, with a very global outlook right from the beginning,” says Kim. The South Koreans also realized the enormous growth potential of ASEAN, citing that the opportunity for South Koreans firms might in fact be higher when considering international expansion, since ASEAN as a region is much larger than traditional markets like the United States or Europe.

ASB is a new global graduate business school in Kuala Lumpur, established by Bank Negara Malaysia in collaboration with MIT Sloan School of Management in 2015. Its curriculum places strong emphasis on Action Learning education, where students immerse in real-world problems within companies throughout their course of study. In these projects, students get to directly apply what they learn from MIT Sloan nd ASB resident faculty.

The ASB’s methodology attracted the interest of the faculty at Hanyang University. Their graduate program on management of technology similarly promotes close interaction between academia and industry and conducts research on public policies linked to innovation and entrepreneurship. The Graduate School of Technology and Innovation Management at Hanyang was created in 2011 to offer master’s and PhD level management training to innovation specialists.

Most of the students have engineering background and come from the industry. Renato Lima-de-Oliveira, Assistant Professor of Management and Political Economy at ASB, highlighted the information exchange that took place during the program. “To us this is a great opportunity to compare and contrast Malaysia’s initiatives with a country that has a successfully developed high-tech industry like South Korea.

Furthermore, we had the opportunity to learn from our Korean partners about the current challenges of their innovation system and the new public policies to promote startups in a country known to be based on innovation led by large firms,” stressed Professor Lima-de-Oliveira, who coordinated the program at ASB and is also a research affiliate at the MIT Industrial Performance Center (IPC), a leading research center on innovation policies.

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For any enquiries, please contact our ASB representative: Pek Ee Siew , Director of Marketing (ee.siew@asb.edu.my)

About Hanyang University
Hanyang University was established in 1939 as the Korea’s first private college of engineering and has been the driving force behind Korea’s miraculous transformation from being of the poorest countries in the 1950s and 60s to be among the largest economies in the world today. Currently, the university has over 32 thousand students and about 4 thousand faculty members and lecturers throughout its 24 colleges and 18 graduate schools. mot.hanyang.ac.kr

Category: ASB Buzz

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