Hong Kong’s DBA and EMBA business courses embrace ‘new normal’ to form the flexible leaders of the future

Any postgraduate business programme designed for ambitious senior executives must continuously adapt and evolve. That is essential to keep pace with the impact of new technologies and how they are reshaping both thinking and practice in established industries and start-up enterprises around the world.

The ability to move with the times, though, has also been important in other ways over the last couple of years. With the strictures of Covid-19 disrupting normal academic routines, it has been necessary for many DBA (Doctor of Business Administration) and EMBA (Executive Master of Business Administration) candidates to switch to online seminars and distance learning.

While initially unexpected, the change directly reflected what was happening in the wider world of business and, as such, gave fresh insights into how quickly certain innovations can catch on and how dispersed management teams might operate in future.

With hindsight, it is clear the experience has also opened up new areas for potential study and reinforced the fact that course content and teaching methodologies can never afford to stand still.

“Our programme has evolved very significantly since it was first introduced in 2006,” says Professor Muammer Ozer, DBA programme director at City University of Hong Kong’s (CityU) College of Business. “We focus on solving important business problems, so the type of research our students do has changed as the problems facing businesses have changed. For example, recent thesis projects have dealt with areas such as big data, fintech, data security and China’s Belt and Road Initiative. These topics were unknown when we began.”

Consistently ranked highly in various international surveys, the CityU DBA is specifically designed for senior executives who want to engage in rigorous research on a topic which has practical business implications and, ideally, can also make an impact on society at large.