Overview

As a core School of XMU, one of China’s top-notch research-intensive universities, XMUSM has a solid and time-honoured tradition in providing quality business education. To keep its edge in teaching and academic research, XMUSM seeks international cooperation with prestigious universities and associations around the world. With its mission to create and disseminate knowledge and ideas that deepen and advance the understanding of management, XMUSM is committed to build and sustain a welcoming and intellectual community that values and respects innovative and path-breaking research. XMUSM encourages its faculty to keep their ‘heads in the clouds and feet on the ground ’, which means, to conduct pioneering research and bring it out of the lab and into the real world.

XMU is one of China’s only two universities with three national key disciplines in economics and management. Thanks to high quantity and quality academic, practical and pedagogical research output, XMUSM has made great achievements in business education fields.

Academic research – XMUSM ranks #1 in China in both the quality of publications and number of citations in domestic journals. Over the past five years, XMUSM’s faculty have published 16 papers in international A+ journals (UTD-24), 55 papers in international A journals and 102 papers in domestic tier-A journals. In 2017, the NSFC major project, Studies of Key Scientific Issues on Accounting Auditing and Corporate Finance under the Context of China, led by XMUSM, along with Tsinghua University, Sun Yat-sen University, University of International Business and Economics and Renmin University of China. As the first NSFC major project in the field of finance and accounting, it has further strengthened the advantage of XMUSM in the finance and accounting disciplines and proved the achievement of the School’s implementation of innovative management research strategy within China’s context.

Practical research – In line with the strategy of being a business school ‘rooted in China’, over the past 5 years, XMUSM has increased its focus on the study of the real economic and management challenges in China. In 2017, XMUSM launched two research institutes: the Research Institute for Doing Business in China (RIDB) and China Institute for Studies in Energy Policy (CISEP). The institutes’ research findings have had significant impacts on the related industries and the government in policy-making. RIDB was selected as a Class A Think Tank in Fujian province, while CISEP has published 60 reviews on energy economy and energy policy in mainstream newspapers and journals.

Pedagogical research - In 1987, 5 years before MBA education was officially launched in China, the MOE entrusted XMUSM to cooperate with two Canadian universities to set up MBA courses. As China’s pioneer in MBA education, XMUSM helped design China’s MBA course outline. XMUSM produced China’s first series of MBA textbooks, and has cultivated many faculties for national higher education institutions. Some XMUSM cases have been awarded ‘National Top 100 Excellent Management Teaching Cases’ and chosen for the international case banks of Richard Ivey School of Business and case banks of Harvard Business School, etc. Some impressive teaching achievements in the past 5 years include 1 provincial teaching award, 1 provincial major project of teaching reform, 6 general projects and 1 provincial project of virtual experimental teaching.

XMUSM has developed a mature research management mechanism at different management levels, including the dean, full-time associate deans, departments, staff offices, and research centres, which oversees research interests, research process and research results with different focuses. XMUSM’s systematic incentive mechanism encourages professors to produce high-quality research output, which is in line with the School’s strategy.

In XMUSM’s next five-year plan, in addition to maintaining and enhancing its current advantages, research development primarily emphasises the following aspects:

(1) Perfect the incentive mechanisms to further motivate research staff to focus on the study of the real challenges in China and increase the number and improve the quality of papers published in domestic Tier-A journals.

(2) Provide more incentives to mobilise teaching staff to write high-quality textbooks and employ innovative teaching methods.