ResearchPod
ResearchPod
The business of a more porous campus
It is believed that being more porous in nature will enable universities to create a talent pool of graduates with en entrepreneurial mindset and access to the very latest thinking, technology and innovation.
But is this enough to stem the tide of talent leaving Malaysia for opportunities elsewhere?
Featuring Professor Datuk Dr Paul Chan (HELP University), Professor Veronica Hope-Hailey and Professor Brian Squire (University of Bristol Business School)
00:00:10 Will Mountford
The new Malaysian Higher education plan for 2024 aims to create a porous university environment that facilitates stronger ties between academia, industry and government. Meanwhile, its rural transformation plan outlines the potential for collaboration with higher education to support the development of 20th century villages and techno hubs to inspire entrepreneurship.
00:00:31 Will Mountford
In the UK, the University of Bristol has a new Business School that will itself be housed at the heart of the university's own innovation tech.
00:00:39 Will Mountford
In Malaysia, its partner help University is nurturing the digital agility of its students, embedding them in businesses to encourage them to think more like entrepreneurs. But how do university curricula keep pace with the speed of change in business to deliver work ready graduates? And how will being more porous help retain talent in the country?
00:01:06 Will Mountford
Joining me from the University of Bristol Business School is the inaugural Dean Professor Veronica Hope, Hailey, the incoming Dean, Professor Brian Squire and from help university Doctor Paul Chan. Hello to all of you, Paul, if we could start with you a little bit about yourself, where you are and what you do.
00:01:21 Prof Paul Chan
My name is Paul Chan. I'm one of the founders of help universe.
00:01:26 Prof Paul Chan
Which stands for higher education learning philosophy. My wife and I borrowed 5000 U.S. dollars to start help 38 years ago. We are a social business enterprise.
00:01:39 Will Mountford
And professor Hope-hailey?
00:01:40 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
I'm Professor Veronica Hope Hailey. I'm called the inaugural Dean and special advisor to the Vice Chancellor.
00:01:50 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
And my job at the university is Bristol. Over the last two years has been to establish a new 21st century Business School within this great Russell Group University. I'm what you call a serial Dean in so far as I've been Deans of business schools.
00:02:10 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
Elsewhere.
00:02:11 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
And so my contribution has been to establish a new strategy, philosophy and approach to business education.
00:02:22 Will Mountford
Thank you. And Brian, over to you.
00:02:24 Prof Brian Squire
Thank you. So I am Professor Brian Squire. I am currently deputy Dean of the University of Bristol Business School, becoming Dean on October the 1st.
00:02:36 Prof Brian Squire
Of most relevance for today is my role in leading the business schools. Part of the Temple Quarter Enterprise Campus development.
00:02:46 Will Mountford
And that's in keeping with the notion of different university models and different learning models, which are at the core of today's conversation. If we could start off with maybe the idea of a porous university, and I know that help university has been modelling some of that. So, Professor Chan, if I could ask what a porous university means in general and to you specifically, if it's something that you.
00:03:07 Will Mountford
Hold closely too, and what that means for future education and future innovation as well.
00:03:12 Prof Paul Chan
I was reading again.
00:03:14 Prof Paul Chan
The idea of a university by John Henry Newman that was written a long time ago and I noticed the tremendous changes in the world order that require us to examine once again the very concept of a university which to me is somewhat of an.
00:03:33 Prof Paul Chan
Unfinished business.
00:03:35 Prof Paul Chan
Being a university becoming a particular type of university and there's so many perspectives to it, what exactly is education and university education and what is the change role of a university in the broader context of nation building?
00:03:55 Prof Paul Chan
And in the wider context of the world order, which is now again being.
00:04:00 Prof Paul Chan
Change so a porous university as a very broad comprehensive concept is basically about inclusivity, equity and diversity. To understand the needs for personal development, collective growth of a society and of course to contribute.
00:04:20 Prof Paul Chan
To a better and wiser world, if we can, and that is our challenge. So there is no particular standards of being a poorest university because.
00:04:30 Prof Paul Chan
The societal needs and the workplace requirements of every society are somewhat different, but there are some common challenges that face us in particular at this moment, how to humanize our education against the onslaught of digital technology. So that is one important concept of the multiple views.
00:04:51 Prof Paul Chan
Of a porous university ought to be more humane, not throw away confusion, Shakespeare and so on, and just focus on the Gen. set world of technology and the deluge of information.
00:05:05 Prof Paul Chan
So we have to search for practical wisdom in how we do things. The wisdom of living our life, which is the most important project for human being, the wisdom of attitude and the wisdom of practice. That, to me, is the poorest universe.
00:05:20 Will Mountford
And handing things over to you, Veronica, as the inaugural Dean of the Business School, I imagine you've had something of a carte blanche to create the education layout of the systems that you'd like to.
00:05:30 Will Mountford
How does the concept of a porous university build into those plans is something that you see as being a challenge to get off the ground if there's, you know, some necessary buy in from the English.
00:05:39 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
Sector. So I'm really interested with what Professor Chan says. I think certainly in the UK there are a lot of questions being asked.
00:05:50 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
At the moment Professor Jan about the role of university.
00:05:54 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
And the significant contribution that they can make to UK society, either through economic growth but also ensuring that that economic growth is inclusive and responsible in the way it creates a 21st century society.
00:06:14 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
So I think we would find that Malaysia and the UK are having probably the same sorts of conversations. I suspect they're happening all over the world and that's because the world is going through a profound change on many different levels ranging from geopolitical.
00:06:30 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
School through to digital through AI, through climate change, I mean, there are enormous challenges going on. So what does that mean for the role of university business schools? Well, one of the reasons that I was intrigued and attracted to setting up a new Business School and just to say.
00:06:51 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
We do already have 4000 students.
00:06:54 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
We're a powerful.
00:06:55 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
Business School already, but we are setting out to do things differently and one of the attractions for me of that is this that I've always seen management and business as being a little bit like medicine. Funnily enough, medicine is a practical subject. I mean the idea that you would teach medical students.
00:07:16 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
And they'd never see a patient or never see the inside of a hospital is look.
00:07:21 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
Chris and I think the same applies to management and Business School students. They need to engage with practitioners, whether those are senior government people, whether they're small business entrepreneurs, whether they're corporate leaders, whether they're tech startups.
00:07:42 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
I mean, practice is incredibly important and so this idea of porosity.
00:07:49 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
Ability. The university having walls that are porous to other people was one of the sort of founding blocks for setting up this new Business School in Bristol and Brian will go on and say more about how the new building we're moving into will reflect that.
00:08:10 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
One of the reasons that we need practitioners of all kinds and sectors involved in the Business School, why we need to partner with people is because the problems that we are trying to solve at Bristol, these big grand social challenges around climate change.
00:08:31 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
The AI.
00:08:32 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
Revolution the the geopolitical challenges that business and government are facing at the moment require multiple minds and multiple lenses to be brought upon them, and they need a problem solving approach. We need to equip students not just with old knowledge.
00:08:52 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
But with new knowledge and with the ability to.
00:08:55 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
Think and solve problems for themselves, and that's why partnering with practitioners is so important. And that means being porous. Just one practical illustration of this. I'm sure you have these roles. Professor Chan in Malaysia, but we have established.
00:09:15 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
Professors in practice, so alongside our normal academic professors, we are appointing into the Business School and engineering have this as well, professors and practice who are senior practitioners who will carry on with their roles in government or industry or commerce.
00:09:33 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
Or as entrepreneurs. But they come and give their time into the faculty for maybe a day a week, half a day, a week, and they work alongside our faculty and teaching students. And that means that this issue of management and business being a practical subject.
00:09:53 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
Effect is never lost for our students.
00:09:57 Will Mountford
Brian handing things over to you on the mention of the Temple quarter campus, if you could tell me a bit more about that and what it is that makes this a University of Bristol endeavor rather than just any other building or any other campus, why is this a Bristol thing apart from just being right at the train station?
00:10:12 Prof Brian Squire
Absolutely. So, porosity, interdisciplinarity, inclusivity are really at the heart of the design and usage actually of our new Temple quarter enterprise campus.
00:10:27 Prof Brian Squire
And I think I can best illustrate that with a few examples. So on the ground floor, which is extremely open to the public, there's no barrier, there's no turnstile to enter the building. We've got dedicated spaces to working in new ways with the local community. So this could be.
00:10:47 Prof Brian Squire
Cultural events. It could be different ways of engaging with local businesses. It could be more inclusive forms of education.
00:10:57 Prof Brian Squire
Then that will offer us new and exciting ways to interact with the City of Bristol. And then as we travel up through the building, we will have industry. We will have research partners as Co tenants alongside us within the building they'll be occupying.
00:11:17 Prof Brian Squire
Spaces adjacent to us using facilities of the university.
00:11:23 Prof Brian Squire
And that's going to help us with some new and exciting collaborations that occur naturally as people Co occupy spaces together. So it it's our expectation that this new campus space will enable new forms of education and of course, exciting new research.
00:11:43 Prof Brian Squire
With multidisciplinary partners and external organisations again to Veronica's point, whether they be public sector, private to the sector.
00:11:55 Prof Brian Squire
Or community based, we will be creating new programs and research that really does address some of the big grand societal challenges that we have today.
00:12:14 Will Mountford
And Professor Chan, coming back to what you mentioned earlier about retaining wisdom and embracing the, I think he called it the onslaught of digital technology so that he can retain the wisdom for these new technology.
00:12:25 Will Mountford
Do you see the past and future as maybe just the different elements of interdisciplinary thinking, or is there something new that comes out of putting past and future together on top of current academic approaches?
00:12:38 Prof Paul Chan
We are obviously we are moving from the mono discipline to multi inter, but more importantly now is the very idea of transdisciplinary how we integrate all the disciplines to understand the complexity of the world.
00:12:54 Prof Paul Chan
In our Business School, we not just emphasize problem solving, which do many of us are just puzzles because they have finite answers. When we ask them to sit for exams, the world has wicked problems, not in the sense of morality. Wicked in the sense that the problems are unstructured.
00:13:14 Prof Paul Chan
Problems and therefore every solution becomes a problem. Look at what's happening in the Middle East and in many parts of the world every solution becomes another problem. So all this unpredictability of unknown.
00:13:29 Prof Paul Chan
Both. How do we know these unknowables when we teach in the preschool, we start studying cases per say, but also use cases, and we therefore have to put to scenario building of possible futures. What are the possible futures that may or may not happen?
00:13:49 Prof Paul Chan
We are trying to educate young people, including ourselves through experiential learning. Besides the standard stereotype set of syllables or a set of syllabi.
00:14:00 Prof Paul Chan
The world. But when we come up through the world, it is not about answering or being assessed to pass the exam. The important thing is how to question. So to me, education, especially in the university, is a form of liberation and is a type of personal change. If you spend three to four years.
00:14:21 Prof Paul Chan
The university, and if you do not notice some behavioral changes in the students or ourselves learning from study.
00:14:29 Prof Paul Chan
Then it means our liberation aspect of education is not achieved. So in this broader context, I look at the concept of critical being and of course, in terms of matter thinking skills. How do we think about the way we think about our thinking? A lot of questioning, a lot of inquiring.
00:14:49 Prof Paul Chan
But at the same time, we have to produce a certain type of human being. One of the values that we have is the courage to.
00:14:57 Prof Paul Chan
BB as in being B as in becoming but becoming who and what and how shall we do it? So these are some of the matter physical questions related to the ontological aspect of education, the very construct of reality. What is reality to us? And Hamlet has asked the question.
00:15:18 Prof Paul Chan
To be or not to be and so.
00:15:20 Prof Paul Chan
On our limited understanding of epistemology, so many new things, new article, thousands of articles and leadership. But leadership is so elusive we cannot find 2 good people to send for a presidential race. That's the type of challenge we are facing. So what do we produce in the university to serve?
00:15:40 Prof Paul Chan
Society to make society a better world. So we are being challenged in a very frontal.
00:15:45 Prof Paul Chan
To be beyond setting exams and so on, so should we get rid of some of the exams? Some of the questions that we ask that we impose on our students to answer, shouldn't they construct the questions and answer them themselves rather than be imposed on them? These other questions I'd like them to answer during these three years.
00:16:05 Prof Paul Chan
So I like some sort of renewal or reinvention of how we do things, but unfortunately it's very difficult because we are connected to various professional bodies. And if you need to be an accountant, you have to follow the syllabus of the professional body and so on and so on. So even though we are.
00:16:23 Prof Paul Chan
University with various aspirations, including the expiration but not they are also constrained by professional requirements that you cannot debate. If you want to be. For example, an accountant.
00:16:36 Will Mountford
I was wondering, as you're talking, this is a very philosophical aspect to take, but there are some things either in qualifications or in the workplace.
00:16:43 Will Mountford
Do require a practical component of being able to solve a problem. Either rewire that button, fix a cybersecurity leak, code that, or develop a new business proposal. So how do you bridge that philosophy?
00:16:56 Will Mountford
To real world tangible hands on applications.
00:17:01 Prof Paul Chan
Yet then recently we were approved to introduce the recognised prior learning program. We call it appeal Q that even though you may not have a formal degree and I think this is practice in UK, two people with relevant years of experiential learning.
00:17:17 Prof Paul Chan
Maybe a lot to do a DBA or an MBA, so we introduce experiential learning. But to top that up, experiential learning is about our past experiences, which may be relevant or which may not be deep enough and so on. So we top it up and say, hey, we are also doing experimental learning.
00:17:39 Prof Paul Chan
Life is an experiment, so in the context of coke KLB cops learning methodology and so on, how do we experience deeply and differently and how do we think in a more reflexive manner REFLE?
00:17:55 Prof Paul Chan
Eggs. It makes a lot of self critical thinking and from reflexive thinking ought to be conceptualized to experiment about life and businesses and so on. So that's the only way that we can innovate. Otherwise, if we follow the standard syllabus offered or imposed by professional.
00:18:15 Prof Paul Chan
It is.
00:18:16 Prof Paul Chan
Example. Then we cannot construct the future because what we teach is not related to the future. We do not know the future, and I'm sure during the next five years things will change faster than the last 15 years. Within this 6-7 months that GPT has transformed itself so much.
00:18:30 Will Mountford
And we're talking about moving culture, transforming syllabus and transforming culture. My university culture was attending well, that this maybe I will admit more insular than a porous university today might aspire to. I did a biology degree.
00:18:45 Will Mountford
And I viewed people who are doing chemistry with suspicion. And pharmacology was alien. Strangers had admitted they would share three of the five same classes, but still different worlds, different people. Professor Hope Haley. Is that something that you see as you know, a flinch, an instinct that has to be overcome in the Bristol campus or in the UK sector?
00:19:06 Will Mountford
More widely in terms of bringing together new cultures and attitudes from different degree courses, let alone different departments.
00:19:13 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
So again, one of the things that's really struck me about coming to the University of Bristol Business School.
00:19:21 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
Is the eclectic nature of the disciplines of the faculty employed, but within the Business School. So we have nearly 200 faculty. There are geographers. There are engineers. There are computer scientists, there are finance specialists. There are accountants.
00:19:41 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
There are sociologists, there are psychologists. I originally read history as an undergraduate degree and then went on and did two business degree.
00:19:52 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
So actually what you find at Bristol is this incredible within the Business School itself, an incredibly broad number of disciplines through which the students are expected to view business and management. So we're not a mono discipline.
00:20:12 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
We're not made-up just of Business School people. We study business, we study management, we study leadership, but we study it from a variety of different lens.
00:20:25 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
And that means in addition that we continue this great tradition that has always existed within the UK higher education sector of critical thinking because there is no one way to think if you've got a variety of disciplines.
00:20:46 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
Looking at the same phenomena.
00:20:49 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
They will look at it through different lenses, so a tech person might look at the technological aspects of an AI, but a sociologist and a psychologist will require the students to look at the societal impact of that technological revolution, and I think having worked.
00:21:09 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
At senior levels in a number of different business schools across the UK, I found that quite unique to Bristol and it gives it quite a cheerfulness actually because there's lots of space for different faculty to operate.
00:21:26 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
But within the direction of travel for this Business School, through our declared strategy, we're not stopping there because our intention and we've already started to do this, but it will develop under Brian's leadership, we are intending.
00:21:46 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
To work with our colleagues in engineering, in computer science, in medicine and in science more generally, as well as the arts and social scene.
00:21:56 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
Frances and the reason that we are pursuing this interdisciplinary approach to both research and education is because we do not believe that actually these grand social challenges, as they're called, some of them encompassed within the sustainable Development Goals, but more.
00:22:17 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
Generally called these grand social challenges can in fact be addressed through a single discipline lens that came through with the pandemic.
00:22:27 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
Make will and the response to COVID. There was no one discipline that could solve the problems of COVID. Of course there was, you know, the scientists could come up with a vaccine, but the vaccine in itself did not solve the pandemic. There was social issues to be addressed. There were a variety of commercial and financial issues.
00:22:49 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
That were to be.
00:22:49 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
Trust. And so this need to bring in different disciplines to work together, to actually address these issues of really, really important. And Professor Chan has quoted Shakespeare, but I'll quote the 20th century philosopher Karl Popper.
00:23:10 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
Karl Popper said students will find that problems may cut right across the borders of any subject matter or any discipline, and he was referring to the fact that the idea that you can look with a single lens and solve a complex problem is probably highly.
00:23:31 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
And let's face it, what the world's going through right now needs the best brains from a variety of disciplines brought to bear on some of the challenges we have and the legacy we're going to leave our children. So that's why Bristol's going into that interdisciplinary approach.
00:23:50 Will Mountford
And.
00:23:51 Will Mountford
Plan from students coming in, or maybe I've been on the course for a little while. Do you see that appetite for bridging the distance between disciplines between school?
00:24:00 Will Mountford
As Professor Hope Bailey said, maybe the physical distance coming out of lockdown.
00:24:04 Prof Brian Squire
Absolutely. So we believe that it is both important to train them with in disciplines and across disciplines. It's hard to be a member of a multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary team without having both disciplinary excellence, but also then the skills to work with people from other disciplines.
00:24:28 Prof Brian Squire
So you mentioned in your.
00:24:29 Prof Brian Squire
These an aversion to people from those other programs. What we will be looking to do is to give our students both these skills and the desire to work with students from other backgrounds because it helps them to work on bigger problems.
00:24:50 Prof Brian Squire
To be able to address them in new and innovative way.
00:24:54 Prof Brian Squire
And so yes, we will be constructing programs that have almost at shape to them with depth within disciplines, but also breadth across those disciplines as well. And we see that as being a real growth for the University of Bristol Business School over the next 5 to 10 years.
00:25:11 Will Mountford
And to pass things back to you, Professor Chan, in terms of the grand social challenges and sustainable development goals, you know pressing issues for world stability, security, health, prosperity.
00:25:23 Will Mountford
How much can universities in in a very small sliver of time that they have someone as a student for three or four years, make someone who has the skills, the attitude to spend, you know, the rest of their life, maybe fixing those problems across different disciplines? Is there enough time spent with one person?
00:25:43 Will Mountford
To instill everything that they need going forwards.
00:25:46 Prof Paul Chan
First of all, congratulations to Prof Hailey and Bristol Bristol School in setting up what Kung would say a new paradigm for business education.
00:25:57 Prof Paul Chan
The thing to answer your very broad question will is to ask about the program learning outcomes that we can construct, what type of students or graduates that we desire that they should have certain attributes and qualities. To me, I think one of the most important is that there should be exemplary.
00:26:18 Prof Paul Chan
In their leadership, as I say, leadership is a very elusive concept, not just having the competency, but we have to go back through some.
00:26:26 Prof Paul Chan
Old fashioned values from rich philosophers all the way down about the virtues of being honest, having integrity, sense of justice, and so on, and so on. So #2 is how to help and serve unconditionally, because this world of capitalism is a very selfish world, is a world of maximizing.
00:26:48 Prof Paul Chan
I'm I'm an economist, being maximized and so on. And the third thing is to be other centered how, after learning from universities and the professors, how do we enable others from our experience?
00:27:03 Prof Paul Chan
And one very important thing too is how do we honor our words by death? We honor our word by this, and in the context of the COVID, and maybe there's another one coming. How to work with nature for the common good. And in that context, how do we appreciate others and our own blessings?
00:27:24 Prof Paul Chan
To be appreciative of ourselves, sometimes we forget that we have to love ourselves without being narcissistic. And lastly, what type of legacy that we create now? Not when we are very old and right. Our will for other people.
00:27:40 Prof Paul Chan
So at this very moment, we are constructing, meaning I'm making sense of our conversation right now in a way, we are constructing a legacy among us. Thanks to all of you, we have a chance to participate in this, shall we say, a critical dialogue. And so I have my own views about about this education.
00:28:00 Prof Paul Chan
Journey, I call it the five else. One obviously is to focus on learning leading living, leveraging how to leverage resources and so on. And legacy building are we legacy builders? That's the question we ask ourselves as education.
00:28:26 Will Mountford
You mentioned something there, about the inherent selfishness of a maximized capitalist system, and I know that the responsible business attitudes of Bristol have been something that Professor Hope Paleo spent your own research time with. How do you address that kind of attention? How much does business success require irresponsibility?
00:28:47 Will Mountford
May be held much. Does responsibility limit business venture?
00:28:51 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
Yes. Well, I always say to the students when they graduate in the reception afterwards.
00:28:57 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
That they are the privileged ones. If they've had a university education that puts them in a position of privilege, they may not have experienced it as a position of privilege, but in the great world order, it's still a privilege to receive a university education. And so I always say to them with that privilege.
00:29:18 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
Comes responsibility.
00:29:20 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
And you have a responsibility not just to yourself, indeed, not primarily to yourself, but you have a primary, a responsibility to those that have not been privileged to have a university education. And I always say, if you want to make us proud as alumni, go out into the world and use this.
00:29:40 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
For the betterment of society. Now that can come through absolutely ensuring economic growth through a vibrant business and commercial sector. It can come through you becoming an entrepreneur. It can come through you working in the third sector in the charitable sector, in international aid or government.
00:30:02 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
I mean, it's a variety of ways.
00:30:05 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
But this idea that we all have a responsibility back into each other became really, really clear during the pandemic and in the pandemic I published 3 reports on responsible leadership because I did 127 individual interviews with chief executives.
00:30:24 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
Chief finance officers, chief marketing officers, anybody who was operating at board level during the pandemic years.
00:30:34 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
And basically I tracked how that experience of COVID was changing their attitudes to leadership, and it did change their attitudes to leadership. Firstly, as we were talking about earlier, they realised that no one person or no one organization could solve that problem, and they became much more aware.
00:30:57 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
Of the interdependency of everybody within society.
00:31:01 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
To come together to solve that problem, I think the second thing is what Mark Carney, the former Bank of England governor, calls needing a social licence to operate so businesses have come under much greater scrutiny recently. Everybody is living with much greater scrutiny.
00:31:21 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
Certainly in Western society there is so much more technological ability to track.
00:31:28 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
People to track organisations to seek greater transparency of how business or indeed private enterprises, operate that leaders have to understand this idea that Mark Carney calls. Have you got a social license to operate?
00:31:49 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
Are people actually going to allow you to exist as a business and they're going to judge that?
00:31:56 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
That on the extent to which they think that they can trust you in terms of both your ability, your benevolence, but also in terms of your integrity. So your ability, can you actually do the job? Can you be the sort of business that you purport to be? Secondly, are you entirely self-serving and just?
00:32:16 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
Delivering shareholder value for your shareholders or are you oriented towards your employees and your society? And thirdly, can we see can we track a moral code through your decision?
00:32:29 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
Making that indicates there is some integrity behind you. This shift in businesses and business leaders being held to account by society, not just the financial press or their shareholders, is a shift that accelerated during lockdown.
00:32:50 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
And I don't see that going away anytime soon.
00:32:54 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
Soon you see the amount of scrutiny the certainly in the UK at the moment, the amount of scrutiny the tech companies and the social media platforms are under for some of the unrest that we've experienced in the last week. And there are again questions being asked.
00:33:14 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
Do the tech companies and the platforms understand?
00:33:19 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
That there are limits to how they operate, and that's absolutely prevalent at the moment through the UK press. It's a real shift that's gone on across the world about how we view business. We have to help our students understand that that's the world.
00:33:39 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
They're entering into and that's a very different world perhaps.
00:33:43 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
A very different business world, perhaps to the ones their parents entered into when they graduated from university. Very different. Much more scrutiny, much more questioning.
00:33:54 Will Mountford
Now we've talked about changing technology, changing attitudes and changing worlds. I'd say one of the most evident ways that the world is changing is developments in supercomputers and AI, which we've touched on, and Bristol happens to be home to one of the latest biggest supercomputers isn't bad.
00:34:12 Will Mountford
AI Brian, could you tell me more about how that's come about, what plays it takes in a Bristol campus and what it means for Bristol people as well?
00:34:21 Prof Brian Squire
Sure. Thank you. We switched on our supercomputer Isambard AI in the spring and at the same time announced that we will host the new AI research resource in a drive to further AI research within the UK. Now obviously I'd take a more Business School.
00:34:41 Prof Brian Squire
Lens on this today's discussion and some of those technical developments happen in other parts of the.
00:34:49 Prof Brian Squire
Thirsty. But we are both collaborating with them and users of that supercomputer as well. So if I think about how that interacts with more ethical approaches to business, well, first, it's worth saying that the university is at the forefront of AI safety.
00:35:11 Prof Brian Squire
Whether that be national security or the risks associated with new AI models and within the Business School, we want to ensure that students are both sufficiently familiar with the technology as well as the opportunities and.
00:35:28 Prof Brian Squire
Changes that it presents, coupled with an ethical approach to decision making so that they are able to make good choices when they're leading in businesses. So it isn't sufficient to just understand the technical parts. It's not the sufficient to just understand the ethical parts, but you need to be able to understand.
00:35:49 Prof Brian Squire
Both if we are to truly develop the type of leaders that Veronica and Professor Chan has been alluding to earlier on in that conversation. So we're developing new masters programs that bring together technologies, not just AI, but a range of technologies.
00:36:09 Prof Brian Squire
From across campuses across the campus with other parts of the social sciences, whether that be business or law, to look at new types of education in that T shape that I was alluding to earlier. So it's exciting times for us ahead.
00:36:27 Will Mountford
And Professor Chen, on your side of things, help is a premier digital institution, I think, to give it a a full accreditation.
00:36:35 Will Mountford
And title. Can you tell me what that means for the staff and students there?
00:36:39 Prof Paul Chan
But that means that we are recognized in our education and training courses in contributing to the development of technology education in the context of digitalization. And recently we are given support in form of various training grants to initiate digital.
00:37:00 Prof Paul Chan
Entrepreneurship for people with disabilities and also with neurodiversity.
00:37:06 Prof Paul Chan
At the same time, we also have another grant from the government to look at the wider applications of AI in ESG components, digital forensics and the like. So we are moving away from some of the traditional curricula into professional development programs for upskilling.
00:37:27 Prof Paul Chan
And reskilling and this arose from the consequences of the pandemic, when many people lost their jobs. So there is a program to rescue and upskill people at the same time in Asia, there is a change in the tremendous aging, the growth of the aging demographics.
00:37:45 Prof Paul Chan
They are talking of hundreds of millions of people who will be more than 60 years old. Incidentally, I'm 82 years old, so we are moving into a very different demographic and therefore we have to construct new types of training to look after these people and to continue to sustain senior citizens.
00:38:06 Prof Paul Chan
To continue to be productive far apart from various jobs that will be replaced by robotics, AI programs and so on. But there are many creative things that senior citizens and non academic people can act.
00:38:20 Prof Paul Chan
Higher because of AI, especially in creative work. So in that way we are creating a new type of workforce in Asia that who can do remote work, creative remote work and they become more self-employed and more mobile. So between sectors occupations let's just geographically.
00:38:40 Prof Paul Chan
They don't have to leave their place of Apple. They can do their work from home remotely. So in this way we we create and sustain the self esteem and self-confidence of an in.
00:38:52 Prof Paul Chan
Visual that he is not made obsolete by the younger people, highly skilled people or more competitive economies, etc. So this I think is one important role of our university and our business faculty how to sustain education beyond the three to four years.
00:39:13 Prof Paul Chan
Of getting.
00:39:14 Prof Paul Chan
I think university should have a new type of engagement or social contract with society and say your three to four year degree program is simply not enough and the university is there to support all of us until we are no more around. That is truly.
00:39:34 Prof Paul Chan
Meaningfully lifelong education. This should be the journey.
00:39:45 Will Mountford
And that leads on to Malaysia's rural transformation plan. In terms of the upscaling, bringing new technologies and new people together. So I wonder if you can tell me a bit more about how that reflects an idea of collaboration and mutual benefit rather than, you know, turning up in a village and saying here's a computer. Tada, how that kind of benefit is directed?
00:40:04 Will Mountford
And built so that their voices are brought in.
00:40:08 Will Mountford
To the learning and that information is brought into their community in a useful way.
00:40:13 Prof Paul Chan
Our Prime Minister has introduced the concept of Matani MADANI. It's about social justice. We are not fully urbanized and there's still a large population on the fringe of urban areas and so on. But we are a small country, communication logistics, they're excellent.
00:40:32 Prof Paul Chan
But it's not the physical aspect of that. It is about changing the mind.
00:40:37 Prof Paul Chan
That is difficult. We are a multiracial society and we have many ethnic groups with a long history of migration from all parts of the world, from India, China, Portuguese, Dutch, British and so on. So in this type of window and with the urban rural.
00:40:57 Prof Paul Chan
Right. But in particular the digital.
00:40:59 Prof Paul Chan
Divide so there's some urgency to for less how we understand each other. Many countries like ours in the throes of two things. One is nation building, the other one is economy building. And I noticed something happening in UK. You have to redo the nation building again because of the huge.
00:41:20 Prof Paul Chan
Migrant population, but some other countries are more pleasant. They are more homogeneous, so the parts of nation building. I wouldn't say it's.
00:41:28 Prof Paul Chan
Completed, but it's not such a challenge, so it will be just the economy building part, which is also troublesome here.
00:41:35 Prof Paul Chan
So in our context, we want to upgrade the mindset, not just the economic well-being person. The mindset of the people in terms of cultural intelligence and having a global mindset to umm.
00:41:50 Prof Paul Chan
Understand all the challenges that are happening by the hour and because communication is very open in Malaysia, we have so many TV stations all possible access to the digital world and this is our challenge.
00:42:04 Will Mountford
We are coming to the end of our time here together today and I think it would be a good point to just reflect on everything we've talked about in terms of the changing worlds, changing courses and changing campuses and think about what it means to, I mean, can anyone resist that change? You know, is there any hope of standing against the tide of AI new technologies and?
00:42:24 Will Mountford
Population movement or if they.
00:42:26 Will Mountford
A way that you can be leading that change. I think that preferred term these days as a disruptor or a challenger, professor Hope Haley. If you have any thoughts of maybe being ahead of that curve or swept along behind it.
00:42:39 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
We absolutely have an ambition to do things differently. At Bristol, we already do the core competences, the core activities of a Business School extremely well, albeit from a very multidisciplinary lens.
00:42:55 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
But we are going to rethink the delivery of Business School education and this new building. Temple quarter will facilitate that practice being different and we are really trying to think how as Professor Chan.
00:43:15 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
Describes it how our students can learn grow in every dimension, not just educationally, but personally, morally responsibly and how they can go out into the world and be responsible citizens and.
00:43:35 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
Leave a legacy for the next generation. We don't delude ourselves that this is going to be straightforward. If you try and challenge accepted ways of operating. As Professor Chan said earlier, to quote Kun, you're trying to do a paradigm shift. We come at this with some humility.
00:43:57 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
But we come at it from a powerful foundation. 1 is the fact that we are already a strong Business School with 4000 students and we could just carry on in the same vein. But we're choosing to change.
00:44:12 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
And also we are nestled very fortunately within a very, very strong UK university that's ranked 5th in the UK for its research and has a a long standing reputation.
00:44:32 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
That gives us some wonderful foundations with which to try and do things differently, to make things better for Professor Chan.
00:44:46 Prof Veronica Hope Hailey
And my grandchildren's generation, when they get to the point of studying, I have one more grandchild than you. Professor Jan. I've got 7, so.
00:44:56 Will Mountford
Professor Squire, your thoughts?
00:44:58 Prof Brian Squire
Thank you. Yes, I'm a big believer in the impact of physical design and infrastructure on behaviors, opportunities and attitudes.
00:45:09 Prof Brian Squire
And so I come at the question of being a disruptor from an infrastructure perspective. And I think what we're doing, which is different is we're not creating a Business School with a building that stands alone. It's not a fortress Business School. It's a building that has many other disciplines.
00:45:30 Prof Brian Squire
And many other non university people embedded within it.
00:45:36 Prof Brian Squire
So that opens up many opportunities. We just have opened new facilities that are a joint project with other parts of the university called the Bristol Digital Futures Institute and that includes state-of-the-art production studios.
00:45:56 Prof Brian Squire
A reality emulator which is effectively a sector agnostic digital twin and a smart cinema where you can take physiological and emotional responses from audiences in real time when someone is presenting or someone is playing a certain type of.
00:46:16 Prof Brian Squire
Movie or other?
00:46:18 Prof Brian Squire
Production and I think those kind of facilities will open students minds to seeing some of the more creative aspects of industry, but also will allow them to experiment and fun and interesting ways with with novel forms of technology. Similarly by having businesses.
00:46:38 Prof Brian Squire
Co located.
00:46:40 Prof Brian Squire
With the school in the new building that will allow new research collaborations, but also will allow students, and therefore the leaders of tomorrow, to experience the way in which those businesses go about doing their business and to learn from that situation.
00:47:01 Prof Brian Squire
And so for me, that's the exciting part of our move down to the new Temple quarter. Enterprise campus will allow us to do things differently and very much in line with the strategy that Veronica was talking about earlier.
00:47:15 Will Mountford
And Professor Chan, your final thoughts.
00:47:17 Prof Paul Chan
I want to thank Christo.
00:47:19 Prof Paul Chan
To particularly Professor Haley and Brian, and the will for this opportunity and privilege to to share views and in this context, I would like to suggest maybe we should continue this conversation to include government officials, academics, business people and of course, students.
00:47:40 Prof Paul Chan
We can create a platform between Bristol Business School and what we have here, so that in this way we can enrich each other culturally etc. Between our two schools and beyond. For example, one of the areas that I am exploring.
00:47:56 Prof Paul Chan
Is in the application of new research methodology from the medical school, or rather the other way around, like phenomenology, which is now adopted by medical practitioners to study cancer patients, and so on. So I use phenomenology to understand leadership studies like.
00:48:16 Prof Paul Chan
Human leadership and so on and so on. It's a qualitative research methodology and method. The other one is to add on to ethnography, as used in anthropology.
00:48:29 Prof Paul Chan
The idea of auto as an autobiography, auto ethnography, that means I am the topic of research, and I'm the researcher, so this is a technique that we can use to do reflective study about leadership, self understanding and so on.
00:48:49 Prof Paul Chan
So these are some of the experiments we can use in qualitative research techniques, phenomenology. Also ethnography and.
00:48:58 Prof Paul Chan
So we can discuss this online. We can even develop a fee. Paying costs develop among us between us or from you to Asian countries. You don't have to judge a lot, but the important thing is to create a voice in society, a voice in the market visibility.
00:49:18 Prof Paul Chan
And a value proposition that people finds relevant, useful, practicable and usable, and of course validated by crystal.
00:49:29 Prof Paul Chan
The school, in the context of the Harvard Business Advanced Leadership Program and so on and so on. But we can contextualize it better. So this is something we can do. It's just maybe one day, 1/2 a day, three hour type of sharing and we can create a subscription model and you pay so many pounds.
00:49:49 Prof Paul Chan
A year and.
00:49:51 Prof Paul Chan
You, you're coming to listen to all the great minds from UK Europe and rather than to look at all these viral videos being sent around, more thoughtful delivery, a mysterious perhaps.
00:50:04 Will Mountford
How's that for transfer?
00:50:05 Will Mountford
The plenary and finding new ventures, new voices, I think we've got a business proposition right there, but that's all we have time for today. So I will say Professor Hope Haley, Professor Squire. Professor Chen. Thank you all so much for your time today.
00:50:17
Thank you.
00:50:18 Prof Paul Chan
Thanks so much. Thank you.