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Asia School of Business

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Category: Featured in the Media

AXIATA Group Bhd (Axiata) in collaboration with Cities 4.0 and Asia School of Business has invited both students and working individuals to participate in a datathon called Urbanlytics 2019. The program is aimed at helping to inspire engaged and innovative thinking as well as build up capacity and talent among Malaysian data science individuals and communities.

This year’s datathon is the second edition of the program in Malaysia and was launched successfully in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh earlier this year. While last year’s datathon was themed around connected cars, Urbanlytics 2019 will focus on smart cities.

Read the full article HERE.
Originally published by Digital News Asia.

Emerging technology and innovative models for leadership.

Like those in nearly all sectors and industries, higher education leaders have been watching the rise of emerging technology and giving careful consideration as to how it will impact their environment in the years ahead. “In a sense, we’ve been telling our students for the past decade or so that AI is coming,” says Professor Loredana Padurean, Associate Dean at the Asia School of Business, a collaboration between MIT Sloan School of Management and Malaysia’s Bank Negara. “But now that AI is here, our industry is not really prepared to deal with it. Many of our students have a higher level of expertise than most schools are ready for.”

In October 2018, MIT announced a new school—the Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing, which will address the global opportunities and challenges presented by the ubiquity of computing—across industries and academic disciplines—and by the rise of artificial intelligence. In Malaysia, the Asia School of Business is focusing on building the skills and tools that future leaders will need to navigate in times of volatility and disruption, as well as the moral leadership to answer the ethical questions that lie ahead.

“We’ve created a new concept of defining skills as smart skills and sharp skills, formerly known as soft skills and hard skills,” says Padurean, to recognize that bundling important and highly-sophisticated skills such as managing complex environments, leading people through change, and building diverse teams, into a bucket of ‘soft skills’ does not really do them justice. Another issue is re-setting expectations that hard skills, once learned, will not carry you for life. “The concept of hard is static, versus sharp or sharpening which is dynamic and ongoing,” she says. Continual learning will be vital, because technical skill requirements are changing so fast.

Originally published by MIT Technology Review.

Through global movements like the Women’s Marches and #MeToo, women have been leading the charge to better the world for future generations. How can we involve more men in gender inequality discussions and initiatives?

Watch the video highlights – an evening with Tan Thiam Hock, Founder of Silky Girl (Alliance Cosmetics), Professor Dr Loredana Padurean, Associate Dean of Asia Business School (a collaboration between the Central Bank of Malaysia and MIT Sloan), Dr Liz Lim, Co-Founder of Medical Innovation Ventures and winner of the EY Woman Entrepreneur Of The Year 2018 and Sutapa Bhattacharya, GM Group Corporate Communication of Tenaga Nasional Berhad, as they share their innovative ways in which we can advance gender balance in all areas of life.

Watch videos
Originally published by Tenaga Nasional Berhad.

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.

TBY talks to Professor Charles Fine, President & Dean of the Asia School of Business, on the school’s origins, the challenges it faced, and the advantages of action learning.

Sloan has other Schools in its network, but all of them with partners or preexisting schools. What are some of the challenges and advantages of starting from scratch?

The ability to be innovative in curriculum design can be enhanced when there is no preexisting legacy to contend with. MIT’s motto “Mens et Manus” (mind and hand)communicates a commitment to integrating theory and practice, creating a deep connection between what goes on inside the classroom and what goes on outside of it, for example, in the “real world.”

Over the past three decades, MIT Sloan School has refined the application of the mind-and-hand motto into its “action learning” curriculum. Consistent with a philosophy of innovation and entrepreneurship, dozens of action learning curriculum experiments have been run at MIT Sloan, and many have been wildly successful. As this approach has caught on, and as some MBA programs have been criticized for an overemphasis on theory, many business schools around the world have been retrofitting action learning into their curricula.

What are the advantages of action learning?

Action learning improves the learning experience, as well as the market value of the graduating students. Action learning projects enable students to learn how to apply theory and tools in complex, dynamic organizations while they are in school so they can add value in organizations much sooner once they get out of school. Perched near the geographic and cultural center of an Asian continent with 3 billion people, ASB students will have the opportunity to engage with multiple projects in multiple countries, in addition to having a term of study at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Thus, ASB MBA graduates will have a truly global action learning background when they finish our program. Our partnerships with corporations throughout the region, allowing students to have the opportunity to do projects in, for example, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Hong Kong, will give them a deep appreciation of the challenges and heterogeneity of Asia and South-East Asia. Employees who comprehend global markets, global competition, and local cultures will be much more valuable to their employers.

Does the ASEAN economic integration impact your outlook?

South-East Asia seems like a particularly ripe area in which to bring more quality business education. I have a colleague who summarizes business strategy theory as “Find a lonely place on the frontier and then innovate.” You want to be on the frontier, but you do not want to go where all the competition is. You want to go where there is less competition and where you can get a foothold and be successful, then innovate and continue to push the frontier.

Relatively speaking, South-East Asia is a lonely place on the frontier. There are many good universities in this region, but it is not overly populated with them. I believe there is enough room for an institution such as MIT to come in and establish itself as a premier partnership school for the region. We very much want ASB to be Asian in orientation, and we want to appeal to people who want an Asian component to their education, as opposed to a copy of a Western school located in Asia.

Read the full article HERE.
Originally published by The Business Year.