The College has announced the establishment of a new college research centre, the China Business and Economic Development Research Centre (CBRC) grounded in a strategic alliance with Guangzhou Pharmaceutical Holdings Limited (GPHL) and HNA Capital.
"I am delighted that the agreement with GPHL and Hainan Capital has borne such early and promising fruit," said Dean Houmin Yan. "The Centre will enable the College to leverage regional synergies and promote high impact research in the Pearl River Delta and beyond."
Professor Haibin Yang of the Department of Marketing and Department of Management has been appointed Director of the Centre for three years until June 2017.
"The Centre draws on the research expertise of all six member departments in the College of Business, and ensures a fruitful and promising development and outputs in various state-of-the-art studies on China research."
CBRC aims to conduct and promote research in regional economic development, financial policy studies, and business model innovations. It will provide a supporting platform for conducting and collaborating highimpact interdisciplinary research on China-related business and economic development in the College. The Centre also aims to organize executive education and training programmes for its strategic collaboration partners.
Teaching and learning initiatives will include strengthening the current taught postgraduate curriculum, postgraduate and research student projects, as well as expanding internship opportunities.
The Centre is underpinned by a wider strategic alliance between GPHL and CityU formalised in a framework agreement signed in December 2013. The alliance aims to pursue collaboration in areas including business, economic and financial policy research, new drugs and diagnostic and therapeutic technologies development, and the training of healthcare management professionals.
The Centre also works with various academic institutions in the mainland. For example, the Centre has been collaborating with Tsinghua University, Harbin Institute of Technology, and CityU Shenzhen Research Institute on a research project that examines the activities of collaborative cybercriminal activities and their impact on e-Business, and also a project on Big Data Analytics for Business Performance Prediction.
Another partnership is with Renmin University for a research project that examines the relationship between internet search engine querying data and local unemployment rate, and the relationship between search engine data and other types of financial indicators.
Finally, a team led by Professor Houmin Yan and Professor Frank Chen, together with four other teams from the mainland China, has successfully secured a National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) major project on China logistics, with a funding of RMB 2.8million. The CBRC team will partner with mainland institutions to develop a systemic theory for China logistics development.
For more on CBRC: https://www.cb.cityu.edu.hk/research/cbrc/about
