Bolstering Leadership Training Abroad

This week, two schools announced the creation of programs aimed at boosting management education and research collaborations in international locales. The MIT Sloan School of Management has entered into a government-sponsored agreement with two universities in Portugal and a group of leading private Portuguese corporations, in order to assist them with their goal of strengthening their capacity in business education and management science at an international level. According to a news release, this initiative will also provide the opportunity for MIT Sloan faculty to continue to broaden their exposure to new global business developments and challenges. Meanwhile, the Haas School at the University of California, Berkeley, has launched a new Asia Business Center focused on significantly increasing its leadership training for Asian business managers and expanding its research collaborations with Asian universities.

Under the five-year agreement with their Portuguese counterparts, MIT Sloan faculty will offer guest lectures to Global MBA Program students at the School of Economics and Business at the Portuguese Catholic University and the School of Economics and Management at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa. MIT Sloan will also offer a summer immersion program for the Portuguese students and under the agreement, professors from those schools will travel to Cambridge as International Faculty Fellows to be exposed to teaching practices which are designed to assist with their goal of enhancing their teaching effectiveness.

“Our faculty will be greatly strengthened by what they learn at MIT Sloan,” says Professor Manuel V. Heitor, Secretary of State for Science, Technology and Higher Education in the Portuguese Government, “and MIT Sloan faculty and students will have the opportunity to deepen their ties with a worldwide academic community.”

The Asia Business Center at Haas builds upon and expands existing joint programs with the National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University with new partnerships inked with the National Taiwan University and the City University of Hong Kong. The new center will enable the Haas School to expand its outreach to Asian alumni, business leaders, and academic communities, and will provide executive leadership training, advanced management programs, certificates on risk management, and business networking opportunities. Future targeted regions include mainland China, India, Japan, and South Korea. The advanced management programs will be offered in collaboration with the Center for Executive Development.

Program creator and director, professor Teck-Hua Ho, is currently traveling with Dean Tom Campbell throughout Asia to promote the Center and sign agreements for new programs. “In recent years, the Asian markets have taken the world by storm. They are now a critical part of the world’s economy,” says Professor Ho. “While there is great demand for management expertise and training, these markets also offer innovations that are changing the way business is done elsewhere. For the academic community this offers rich grounds for joint research.”