Cross-disciplinary research: encouraging a collaborative culture, enhancing industry-academic links, and getting talent to think out of the box. HKAICS’ mission to foster creativity and innovative thinking to equip graduates for today’s multi-tasking (MT) workforce.
As a result of corporate downsizing in the wake of the global economic contraction, employees were frequently finding themselves required to multi-task and be more versatile in performing duties across a wider range of business functions. For companies to better facilitate this multi-tasking, many believe that the answer lies in enhancing the skill set of organisations’ current talent—encouraging and supporting employees to seek external educational support, and in favouring multi-taskers when recruiting new talent. However, this creates something of a paradox, in terms of which subject employers should encourage their staff to study, and on whether the programme should be academically focused or more vocational in nature.
Over the last few decades, numerous collaborative research projects have been conducted into cross-disciplinary research, but have been plagued with both logistical and academic challenges. The solution may lie closer to home than one might expect. On 12 January 2011, City University (CityU) launched the Hong Kong Advanced Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Studies (HKAICS) with Professor Gregory Lee, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences at CityU, serving as the Director of the Institute. HR Magazine had the opportunity to meet with Professor Lee and discuss the institute, how it will impact the local and global community and the availability of potential talent as a result of the programme.
What are cross-disciplinary studies?
The HKAICS states that we are seeing a fundamental shift from research-driven, discipline-bound knowledge production to research that is funder/problem-driven and highly cross-disciplinary. As a result of this shift, some of the HKAICS’ key missions include enhancing:
- Cross-disciplinary collaboration: encouraging a culture of openness and collaboration between the humanities and social sciences and the pure and applied sciences;
- Industry-academic links: demonstrating the necessary link between top-level cutting-edge research and teaching; and
- Knowledge of key issues: teaching and reacting with alacrity to emergent questions of societal concern.
Prior to his arrival in Hong Kong, in August 2010, Professor Lee was Vice President at a large research centre in Lyons, France where he developed what is now the prototype of inter-disciplinary study for Hong Kong. The original idea was for it to operate along the lines of similar schemes in place at Stanford and Princeton.
Most of the academic institutes around the world are focusing specifically on schematic research. Lee pointed out, “I think the mistake is to see the environmental issues, public health issues and business environment as separate.
If you get an infectious disease coming from the other side of the border that has been generated by, say how live foul is kept or reproduced, now that is an environmental problem, which comes across the board as a health problem.
As we’ve seen with SARS and swine flu, environment and public health are absolutely intertwined with each other and have an impact on the social and business environment. I’m not sure a mono-disciplinary approach to these disciplines is the way to go. I think what this is trying to showcase are the advantages of government policy and a healthy and safe business environment.”
The HKAICS programme
Some of the primary themes that the HKAICS will address will be risk management, sustainable development and human impact on the environment, innovation, creativity and entrepreneurship across cultures. Professor Lee stated that while their function is research rather than direct teaching, they are committed to transferring the results of their research to the community via journals and by jointly publishing with the French Research Institute IETT, Global Studies in the Annual Compendium of Global Transcultural Research. Other means of communicating the research with the public include uploading podcasts of seminars, courses and workshops to their website and briefing the public through presentations after workshops have been held.
The professors and advisory board members are available to provide feedback and answer questions from the community. Upcoming activities include an exploratory workshop in March 2011 on coloniality and societal consequences and an additional one relating to humanities and mental health is scheduled in summer 2011.
Shaping tomorrow’s workforce
Today’s workforce is already expected to possess a wide skill set in order to wear the many different hats required of them, and the breadth of skill-sets required looks set to widen even further, as time goes on. Professor Lee stated that there is currently a new movement in Australia, Europe and Hong Kong to emulate what has been done in America in terms of the 3-3-4 system—with six years in high school followed by four years at university.
Lee stated, “There is an appreciation now for how to train people for future employment—to train them to be flexible, to have a broad approach to a range of different disciplines.” He added, “You have a problem and students have to tackle that problem and that is what work life is like. The way I like to see it is that we are basically looking at the problems and the issues and then we look around with disciplinary tools and then create a new body of knowledge. Lots of different disciplines can feed in and out of this and it can be applied to risks, so it is a holistic approach to the world and its complexity.”
Lee described the result of students studying for many years at a university, and graduating with no real creativity or innovative thinking. He stated, “Very often what we see in Hong Kong is that the execution and realisation for cultural projects is wonderful, whereas reproducing excellence is not necessarily the best way to promote innovation and creativity. Even in maths you need to have some sort of creativity. You need professional education for the people that are going to manage, but you also need the entrepreneurial creativity to match what you are going to put in those places, so we hope to bring people in from around the world to think about this.” Lee summarised, “Any company that needs to have creative people would be interested in the Institute because what we are doing is encouraging students to think out of the box, big thinking and not narrow, old-fashioned, disciplinary thinking. “
Impact locally and globally
The HKAICS envisions Hong Kong as a place where scholars from around the world can come
together with various ideas. Lee stated that the Hong Kong community can expect HKAICS, “To bring about the establishment of partnerships between local representatives of international companies and other nations and who are able to act as a hub to articulate the presence and importance of foreign companies and other nations.” Lee cited the example of the frequent foreign trade between Hong Kong and Africa and South America, yet the overall lack of knowledge about the relationships that exist. He hopes to bring people into the Institute to help forge that knowledge gap, and ultimately help Hong Kong gain recognition as a centre of creativity and innovation, where corporations can seek out graduate talent with a broader skill-set and a higher level of thinking.
Paul Arkwright
Publisher
