Education has provided the critical foundation for Asia’s rapid economic growth. However, in an increasingly globalized and digital world, higher education faces an array of new challenges. While the current strengths and weaknesses of educational systems across Asia differ considerably, they share many of the same fundamental challenges and dilemmas.

The fourth annual Stanford Kyoto Trans-Asian Dialogue examined challenges and opportunities in reforming higher education in Asia. At its core, the challenge facing every country is how to cultivate relatively immobile assets—national populations—to capture increasingly mobile jobs with transforming skill requirements. This raises fundamental questions about skills needed for fast-paced change, domestic inequality, the role of government, and choices of resource allocations.

Scholars and top-level administrators from Stanford University and universities across Asia, as well as policymakers, journalists, and business professionals, met in Kyoto on September 6 and 7, 2012, to discuss questions that address vital themes related to Asia’s higher education systems. These included:

• Can higher education meet the challenges of economic transformations?
  As skill requirements change with the increasing use of IT tools that enable manufacturing and service tasks to be broken apart and moved around, how can higher education systems cope? How can education systems address the increasing need for global coordination across languages and cultures? How can countries deal with demographic challenges, with developed countries facing overcapacity and developing countries with younger populations facing an undercapacity of educational resources?

• How are higher education systems globalizing?
  What are the strategies for the globalization of higher education itself? How are universities positioning themselves to attract top talent from around the world, and what are their relative successes in achieving this? What are the considerations when building university campuses abroad? Conversely, what are the issues surrounding allowing foreign universities to build within one’s own country?

• How can higher education play a greater role in innovation?
  What is the interplay between private and public institutions and research funding across countries, and what are the opportunities and constraints facing each? What is the role of national champion research initiatives? For developed East Asian countries, a focus on producing engineers raised the economic base, but many are discovering that they are still not at the leading edge of innovation. What are ways to address this dilemma? For developing countries, the challenge is how to improve basic education from the level of training basic factory workers to creating knowledge workers. How might this be accomplished? Is there room for a liberal arts college model?

• What are the challenges and opportunities in reforming higher education?
  What are effective ways of overcoming organizational inertia, policy impediments, and political processes that hinder reform? What are the debates and issues surrounding ownership, governance, and financing of higher education?

The Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) established the Stanford Kyoto Trans-Asian Dialogue in 2009 to facilitate conversation about current Asia-Pacific issues with far-reaching global implications. Scholars from Stanford University and various Asian countries start each session of the two-day event with stimulating, brief presentations, which are followed by engaging, off-the-record discussion. Each Dialogue closes with a public symposium and reception, and a final report is published on the Shorenstein APARC website.

Previous Dialogues have brought together a diverse range of experts and opinion leaders from Japan, South Korea, China, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, India, Australia, and the United States. Participants have explored issues such as the global environmental and economic impacts of energy usage in Asia and the United States; the question of building an East Asian regional organization; and addressing the dramatic demographic shift that is taking place in Asia.

The annual Stanford Kyoto Trans-Asian Dialogue is made possible through the generosity of the City of Kyoto, the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, and Yumi and Yasunori Kaneko.

About the talk

Emerging economies such as China and India have become “hotspots” of multinational R&D investments. As some observers have argued, some unique products/services are first developed in and for emerging markets, then subsequently introduced to advanced markets. This is named “reverse innovation” and proclaimed to bring great challenges for existing industrial dominators (Immelt, Govindarajan & Trimble, 2009). If true, what would be its impact on multinational global R&D strategies and organizations? What kind of capabilities and mechanism should be developed to respond this change?

Based on case studies in China, Dr. Liang will discuss three new types of multinationals’ R&D units abroad. All of them are host-country-based instead of home-country-based, which indicates the latest change of multinational global R&D distribution. Furthermore, the talk will also explore the global R&D strategy and innovation pattern of Chinese home-grown companies such as Huawei and ZTE, and the relationship between multinationals’ R&D relocation in China, as well as their implications on global innovation landscape.

About the speaker

Dr. LIANG Zheng is currently working at the MIT Industrial Performance Center (IPC) as the Fulbright Visiting Research Scholar. Presently he is carrying out research projects on multinationals’ global R&D network expansion and integration, as well as the internationalization of new industrial leaders from emerging economies. He serves as the associate professor of the School of Public Policy and Management, Tsinghua University, as well as the research fellow and assistant director of China Institute for Science & Technology Policy at Tsinghua University (CISTP), which is jointly established by Ministry of Science and Technology of China and Tsinghua University, mainly focusing on the studies of S&T policy and the national strategy of S&T development. Before joining Tsinghua University, Dr. Liang served as the associate professor of the International Business School in Nankai University. He got his doctor’s degree of economics at Nankai University (2003) and accomplished the senior executive training program on leadership at Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University (2010). The main areas of his research focus on globalization of R&D, IPRs and standardization and the National Innovation System. Dr. Liang has also participated in some of China’s key research projects such as the Strategic Research for National Medium and Long Term Science and Technology Development Program.