Professor Bruce McKern, the first Dean of MGSM, responsible for leading the foundation of Australia’s globally-renowned graduate school of business, returned to Australia in 2016, after a career spent as a researcher, dean, corporate advisor and instructor in the fields of strategy, innovation & international business. He has been actively involved in the plans to establish the Association and believes it will prove a valuable service to our alumni & alumnae worldwide.
After establishing the School, Bruce was appointed in 1989 to the faculty of Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. He was Director of the School’s Sloan Master’s Program and a researcher at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, and later spent five years as President of the Carnegie Bosch Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.
Most recently, Bruce was Professor and co-Director of the Centre on China Innovation at the China Europe International Business School in Shanghai, which he set up with the support of five multinational corporations. He co-directed a three-year research program on innovation in China and MIT Press published the findings in China’s Next Strategic Advantage: from Imitation to Innovation (with colleague George Yip) in April 2016.
This book is the most comprehensive published account to date of China’s extraordinary path to innovation, including an explanation, with many examples, of the interaction between public policy and private enterprise in transforming China’s innovative capacity. Michael Spence, 2001Nobel Laureate in Economics, said of the book:
“Yip and McKern have written an eye-opening book about the startling growth of innovation in Chinese companies. Using hundreds of cases, they leave no doubt that China is now a major force in innovation with an increasing global reach. The case that engagement with the Chinese system is essential for business success in the coming decades is compelling.”
A second book, co-written and edited with a Cambridge colleague, has just been published on China’s controversial One Belt One Road Program. Titled The Belt and Road Initiative: Opportunities and Challenges of a Chinese Economic Ambition (with David de Cremer; Sage Publications, January 2020), the book explains the goals and implementation of this ambitious initiative and analyses its economic and geopolitical impact.
In a chapter on the implementation of the program, Bruce analyses the Initiative’s probable cost relative to the development needs of southern and central Asia, as well as the competing priorities of China’s own domestic development programs. He concludes that the BRI would benefit from a more inclusive approach to involving other nations in the initiative, but is doubtful if that is likely to happen under the prevailing political climate, exacerbated by the pandemic.
To order the books:
https://www.amazon.com.au/Chinas-Next-Strategic-Advantage-Innovation/dp/B01F2JMCP4
https://www.amazon.com.au/Belt-Road-Initiative-Opportunities-Challenges/dp/935328791X
