According to a press release, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) has launched the Knowledge Transfer Forum (the Forum) to provide a platform for matching the expertise and research outputs of eminent business scholars with global companies.
Knowledge transfer has long been a strong DNA strand of PolyU that strives to bring together teaching, research, and real-life application as its core missions. Established by PolyU Faculty of Business (FB), the Forum aims to generate exchanges and potential partnerships between academics and businesses to translate knowledge and research into commercial applications that foster economic and social development.
The Forum will feature important business themes such as Belt and Road financing, smart city governance, FinTech, AccounTech, RegTech, port coordination in the Greater Bay Area, etc. and will invite renowned scholars from PolyU and other global top business schools, industry experts and business leaders to speak in the monthly symposium. Through the Forum, PolyU hopes to facilitate business matching and knowledge transfer.
The inaugural symposium – “Star Professors X Top Business Management” of the Forum, hosted by the School of Accounting and Finance, was staged recently in mid-December 2018 at the PolyU campus.
Distinguished speakers included a notable professor from the UCLA Anderson School of Management, a professor from Columbia Business School and a Professor at the University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government. The three professors each delivered speeches on “Efficient and Inefficient Pricing of Stocks in Markets around the World”, “How to understand Complex Financial Statements using Simple Economic Intuitions”, and “Economic Nationalism in the US: Causes and Implications for the US-China Trade War” respectively.
Addressing the opening of the symposium, the Dean of FB and the Professor in Business Administration stated that the Forum is one of the many initiatives FB is pursuing to facilitate knowledge transfer and promote greater synergy in academic and business sectors.
He noted that FB has set clear goals in deepening University-industry-community collaborations in the coming six years. It is hoped that PolyU and other universities will be able to work closely with the industry to generate positive impacts in business education and international business management in the face of globalisation.
The Head of the School of Accounting and Finance stated that despite a surging growth in the number of large-scale international Chinese firms over the past decade, many are facing great uncertainty and challenges amidst global keen competition.
It was noted that many excellent research outputs and expertise of scholars avail the firms to expedite their global development. Yet, many of such matching chances are yet to be explored outside the academia. The Forum is aiming to bridge this gap.
According to the principal coordinator of the Forum, a professor and the Associate Dean for External Relations and Development of PolyU Faculty of Business, the inaugural symposium covered nine innovative and interdisciplinary research projects presented by FB’s scholars. The presentations combined accounting and finance with societal concerns such as climate change, corporate social responsibility, cybersecurity, psychology and alternative investment strategies.
The symposium attracted 150 on-site participants and reached 100,000 real-time audiences via live streaming. Private consultations by the star professors were arranged for management team from, a major Chinese financial services company in asset management, investment and merchant bank, a multinational professional services firm headquartered in London and a major green energy supplier in China.