20 October 2003

SPEECH BY MR THARMAN SHANMUGARATNAM, ACTING MINISTER FOR EDUCATION, AT THE FIRST ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON WORLD-CLASS PRACTICES IN MANAGEMENT EDUCATION ORGANISED JOINTLY BY THE ASSOCIATION TO ADVANCE COLLEGIATE SCHOOLS OF BUSINESS (AACSB) AND THE EUROPEAN FOUNDATION FOR MANAGEMENT DEVELOPMENT (EFMD) ON 20 OCTOBER 2003, AT THE SINGAPORE MANAGEMENT UNIVERSITY, SINGAPORE, AT 0910 HOURS

Mr Eric Cornuel,
Director-General, The European Foundation for Management Development (efmd)

It gives me great pleasure to join you this morning at the first Annual Conference jointly organised by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB International) and the European Foundation for Management Development (efmd). I would like especially to extend a warm welcome to Singapore to the many international participants who are here with us.

2 The business of management education is changing. Global perspectives are now a staple in any leading management school. There is no surprise in this. Business and management schools, more than any others, seek to provide organisations and individuals with the knowledge and capabilities needed to manage change. And the most important changes in the business environment are coming out of globalisation - the globalisation of competition, outsourcing, supply chains, technology development and marketing.

3 So it is too for management education. Take any leading management school and we find that the curriculum, the faculty and the students are increasingly drawn from across the world. And teaching and research themselves are becoming globally-distributed activities, no longer confined to a single unified campus. Joint programmes between centres of excellence in the US, Asia and Europe, especially in graduate and executive education, are gaining importance.

4 The big theme in globalization is Asia. China, India and the ASEAN region are opening up and growing faster than any other region in the world. The continuing emergence of China and India, even with the periodic disruptions that they will likely see, will transform the Asian and global economy over the next 10-30 years.

5 The rest of Asia, and indeed the rest of the world, will want to plug into and maximise our complementarities and linkages with these two continental scale economies. That way, the ripples of prosperity will continue to flow in all directions, not just into China and India.

6 We are already seeing the rapid growth of new economic networks across Asia, driven by both consumers and producers. ASEAN's exports to China are growing by 40% per year, even at a time of weakness in global demand. Factories producing components in Southeast Asia are part of an integrated chain with producers in the coastal cities in China. East Asia's interactions with India are also burgeoning, led by the IT services sector. And India's relations with China - long the weakest link in the Asian economy - have entered a new phase, with an escalation of trade and investments between the two.

7 We are therefore seeing the emergence of a new Asian economy, driven by a manufacturing supply chain between ASEAN and China and a services supply chain between East Asia and India. It will remain an open network, wired into the US and Europe, not an Asia-centric network. The US and Europe will remain major sources for ideas, technology and investment, and major markets, for much of Asia. But the fastest growing linkages, the fastest growing traffic of good and services, of students, tourists and entrepreneurs, are happening within Asia itself.

8 Management schools will have to keep track of this evolving Asian landscape, make sense of it, decipher emerging trends and help individuals and companies take advantage of them. But management training and research will also reflect another fact, which is becoming integral to the knowledge-based economy - and that is its intensely collaborative nature. First, collaboration between universities and industry is critical to developing innovation capabilities, anywhere in the world.

9 Second, while innovation capabilities in any country depend on national characteristics, such as the quality of the school system and supportive public policy, success in knowledge-based activity now depends critically on openness and linkages with centres of innovation in other countries. Go it alone strategies are no longer viable. The cutting edge research and advances in knowledge are now taking place in partnerships of universities and research institutions spread across the world. Successful national innovation systems therefore depend not just on the quality of local research activities and industry clusters, but on their global connectedness.

10 We are naturally pleased that the AACSB International and efmd have chosen to hold their first joint conference in Singapore. The Singapore Management University's hosting of the event - which brings together leading academics from three continents, North America, Europe and Asia - in some respects highlights Singapore's growing role as an education hub and, more broadly, as a marketplace for the interplay of ideas and cultures.

11 It is one of the reasons why numerous students from China, India and the region come to Singapore. We have also seen several leading international universities setting up campuses here in Singapore. And our own universities are continuing to forge links with centres of excellence in the US, Europe and elsewhere in Asia, to provide joint programmes, especially in graduate and executive education. These have led to a regular exchange of faculty and students. They have also led to the exchange and cross-fertilisation of ideas. We can expect this cross-fertilisation to grow in leaps over the next 2 decades. Higher education will be richer for it.

12 Over the next two days, you will I am sure have opportunities to exchange views on the evolving economic and social landscape that is shaping new challenges in corporate strategy, and how management education will have to respond to this landscape. I wish you a productive exchange, valuable networking and a pleasant time in Singapore.