Prof. Ted Snyder, former dean of Yale School of Management, Prof. Christoph H Loch, dean of Cambridge Judge Business School, and Prof. Retesf Levi from MIT Sloan School of Management were invited to give keynote address in video form at Dean’s Forum at the 40th anniversary ceremony.

Prof. Ted Snyder gave a keynote address

In the video, Prof. Ted Snyder focused on the issue of anti-globalization in both long run and more recent context regarding human capital, the impact of friction of globalization on organizations, businesses, trade, and how to conduct the economic activities going forward, and some remarks about management education. He pointed out that human capital is so important in modern economies, especially, in a period of greater friction. For these who are better connected, more aware, and able to navigate those frictions, frictions equal opportunities. Prof. Snyder also talked about the online education model, which he referred to as ‘global network week’. In the context of a network, schools offer programs and develop options, and students and faculty stay at home.

Prof. Christoph Loch gave a keynote address

Prof. Christoph Loch gave a keynote address about the impact of business schools on social development. He indicated that the purely capitalistic society led to a winner-takes-all phenomenon, because many people are not fully informed, or not capable of making independent decisions, in the context where the legal system doesn’t capture all externalities. Prof. Loch said: “In operations, it has emphasized optimization, rational strategic interactions, rather than people in the organization wanting to feel home, and for example, in the field of innovation, you only get the best of creativity out of people if you go beyond incentives and beyond transactions among rational agents." Prof. Loch pointed out that business schools should improve their capability of getting engaged in interdisciplinary research, and need to incorporate externalities in the teaching.

Prof. Retsef Levi delivered a keynote address

Prof. Retsef Levi shared his collaborative research with ZJU and other four Chinese institutions, focusing on how to leverage supply chain analytics and other multidisciplinary research to inform global and local policy to mitigate risks on food management. In the research, they scrape and bring together all the related data sources in an automated way, and make an integrated unified structure dataset, covering most of the prefectures and all the provinces in China, which includes over 4 million test records from more than 75,000 files, processing over 15,000 unique data templates. Prof. Levi also showed a schematic diagram of the supply chain of aquatic freshwater and aquatic products to illustrate whatthe dataset could do in terms of research and insights.