Postgraduate Programmes

Over the period I was Dean, I launched PhD programs in every one of the other areas, going from the most strong, the second one was OB, the third one was marketing, the fourth one was strategy in organization, the fifth one was operations management. And we'd probably stop there. And we also in between launched the PhD in general management. You have to afford research. So I had to find ways to generate. So over the period, if you don't mind, I am going to consult my notes, but I listed down all of the post-graduate programs I launched since I was dean. First one was the executive MBA in 2011. That has now had 4 cohorts, and you would probably have seen the other day that we have entered into the Financial Times ranking. You have to have at least 3 sets of students through before you can go into the rankings. We came in as the highest entrant, 36th in the world. That's pretty good. And before launching that, which was in 2011, we did extensive focus groups across Asia. So we actually interviewed about 130 managers, and that's when we got the design of 9 modules, 6 of which were done in Singapore, the other 3 were done overseas. So we picked Wharton obviously because Wharton's relationship to our founding. And then we picked Peking in China, which is a really top research school, and ISB. In 2012, we launched the Master of Innovation. Surprisingly, that's done much better than I thought, and has managed to achieve the same heights of about 40 to 45 students. And I should perhaps point this out. I said that revamp the advisory board at the business school so changed it completely so it's much more representative, not just the finance but manufacturing and service industry and government. So one I revamped the advisory board and two I set up an alumni board of LKCSB and I took each one of these proposals in front of them. I used the advisory board to go through the strategy of the program. They kept asking the question, What's the job after the Master of Innovation? which is interesting question. And of course it is a jolly good question so we tried to answer that more and more. We understood that Entrepreneurship was the term that would, so there was a focus also in the program of entrepreneurship, which we have renewed in Gerry's tenure, well because he is the professor of entrepreneurship which is really hard to find. So Master of Innovation in 2012, and Master of Quantitative Finance, which was a relationship with Cass Business school in the city of London, which is probably, in Britain, the best finance school, LBS is probably the other one. And we launched that in 2012. 2014, we launched the Master of Management degree, which is, if you like, a management study degree for people who do not have an undergraduate degree in business studies or management studies, so tailored for people from the Humanities, from the Arts, from Social Sciences, from Technology and so on. And I pioneered that program in Warwick Business School. When I left Warwick Business School, we had 150 students in the program. When we launched it, the first class we had 70 students and a current one close to 100 or maybe 90. I always knew there was a market for it here. And I think it's a market that makes sense because it makes people job-ready who have not studied. And we also have a partnership with SUTD as well in that program which enables students who have done 4 years of Engineering degree to do the 5th year of management with a number of electives counted towards the master degree. That's worked out pretty well. And of course, just before I gave up, in the last year I launched the distance learning version of the MBA with Instituto de Empresa, which is a Spanish Business School in Madrid. I know the director extremely well and we launched that last year in 2014 and we now have a 2nd cohort in 2015 and that was because I always felt there was a need to be looking at distance learning in the context of Asia. In Quantitative Finance, well that's been a strength of ours for a long time. Master of Management was very much an MBA for people who didn't have a business studies degree. And so I engineered the reengineering of the MBA degree. That took place over 2011-2012 and we were launched in 2013. So we will have by, 2017, 4 cohorts of the MBA program so that we can go into the FT rankings.And I should add by the way, I know you have asked me about post-graduate programs, but I would add, and I also mentioned about the Doctoral programs, which is tremendously important. You should see those 2 things in parallel. The Doctoral programs, in many ways, was financed by the surpluses after the Masters programs. But they are also a source of students, very good students on there, we may be able to attract to do PhDs. And one of the objectives is to get good research, and good doctoral programs. Faculty will leave unless they have doctoral students. Unless you have a flow of doctoral students, you are going to get faculty leaving. So it's part of a virtuous circle, running a business school. If you are providing very good quality masters programs, and I think we do, then the resources we gain from that, we're putting into faculty development, which makes the teaching in those programs better in the long term. So just as it generates good quality research, it also generates good quality teaching. And it is a virtuous circle.