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“I want to create almost a new type of business school – a convener of industry and executives, where meetings happen,” New HKUST Dean Frederick Anseel says. “A business school in Hong Kong, especially with a European dean, is like a very safe space to start”
For decades, the conventional wisdom about Hong Kong’s role in global business was simple: It was the gateway into China. Frederick Anseel, who became dean of Hong Kong University Science & Technology Business School in February, thinks that framing is now exactly backwards.
“It used to be that Hong Kong was seen as the gateway into China,” Anseel says. “But now it’s more like Hong Kong is the gateway out of China – for going abroad.”
That inversion is the organizing idea behind Anseel’s vision for one of Asia’s most technically distinguished business schools. Chinese technology companies, he argues in a recent conversation with Poets&Quants, are so fiercely competitive domestically that their survival increasingly depends on international expansion. They need partners, connections, and a place to start.
And HKUST, sitting at what Anseel calls “the unique intersection between the world and China and technology and business,” is positioning itself to be that place.
HKUST Business School Dean Frederick Anseel: “My prediction is that in 5 to 10 years, everyone will be looking at universities and business schools and asking: What type of prosperity are you generating? How many new businesses are you spinning out?”
It is an ambitious reframe for a school that has spent 35 years building its reputation largely on rankings – and Anseel, characteristically, is already plotting the next chapter beyond those, too. A Belgian organizational psychologist who built his career across Ghent, Paris, Essex, King’s College London, and most recently UNSW Sydney – where he served as dean – Anseel describes his move to Hong Kong as the product of two converging forces he believes will define the next decade.
The first is AI and technology transforming and driving business. The second is the acceleration of the Chinese economy and its technology ecosystem. Put them together, he says, and the conclusion is straightforward: “For a business school, that’s where you want to be.”
He is candid about his own constraints. Not speaking Mandarin ruled out a mainland China posting. But Hong Kong, he argues, offers something mainland institutions cannot – an international business school culture, deep connections to Western financial and academic networks, and a European dean who can credibly convene executives from Brussels and Beijing in the same room.
That last point is more than a biographical footnote. Anseel describes a specific market gap he intends to fill: European business leaders who know they must engage with Chinese technology companies – in electric vehicles, advanced manufacturing, energy – but have no idea where to start. And Chinese technology entrepreneurs who want to go global but lack the connections and contextual understanding to do so.
The disconnect, as he describes it, runs deeper than a shortage of introductions. When he is in Brussels – he still has family and a professional network there – European executives tell him something he finds striking: their instincts are sharply at odds with their politicians. Where governments are reaching for protective measures, the business community is reaching for partnerships. “They say there’s no sense in protecting us,” Anseel says. “We need to collaborate.” The obstacle is not will but access. China is an enormous country, and knowing where to start – which companies, which sectors, which interlocutors – is genuinely hard from the outside.
The solution Anseel envisions is structural. HKUST, he says, has the academic expertise to organize workshops on topics that would be politically fraught in almost any other setting – financial capital flows in and out of China, strategies for international expansion, the mechanics of cross-border investment. In a university environment, those conversations happen naturally, informally, without the diplomatic weight they would carry elsewhere. Bring executives from Europe, the United States, and mainland China into the same classroom, and the business school becomes something more than a degree-granting institution.
“I want to create almost a new type of business school – a convener of industry and executives, where meetings happen,” Anseel says. “A business school in Hong Kong, especially with a European dean, is like a very safe space to start.”
He acknowledges the school is not there yet. But it is the animating idea behind the executive programs he is already building. “I don’t think there’s a lot of business schools that actually do this,” he says.
HKUST has long carried a STEM identity unusual among business schools – a product of its founding as a science and technology university. Anseel inherited that DNA and intends to lean into it harder, at a moment when the market is moving in his direction.
He offers three examples of what that looks like in practice. At the MBA level, AI is embedded across all core courses – finance, accounting, strategy – not as a discrete elective track but as a baseline expectation. “In China, it is very much business-as-usual already,” he says. “AI is now expected.”
At the executive level, HKUST recently launched a program for what Anseel describes as technology entrepreneurs from mainland China – 50 CEOs and C-suite executives, 12 of them owners of listed companies. The program is co-delivered with HKUST’s School of Engineering, because, as Anseel puts it, putting standard business faculty in front of these audiences would not work. These are people who built businesses on AI, quantum computing, and robotics. They want to go deeper than most MBA curricula can take them – and they arrive with questions that push past the boundary of what business schools typically teach.
The questions they are asking, Anseel says, sit at the intersection of frontier technology and next-generation business models. What will quantum computing mean for crypto and the financial architectures built around it? What does the next wave of AI development – world models, not just language models – imply for companies that have built their competitive advantage on current-generation tools? These are not questions that business professors can answer. But HKUST’s engineering faculty can, and does.
“When we had an opening module, our provost – who is a world-leading AI scientist – was talking about the next models of AI,” Anseel recalls. “There was a half-hour coffee break, and these people said, ‘No, we don’t want a coffee break. We want to hear more.’”
Anseel is candid that the content sometimes exceeds his own grasp. “I must be honest – if I’m in the room, I get lost,” he says. “This is very mathematical stuff.” But that depth, he argues, is precisely the point. It is something only a university with world-class engineering alongside its business school can deliver. And it is why, in his view, the STEM-plus model is not simply a positioning choice but a genuine competitive differentiator – one that most standalone business schools cannot replicate.
At the undergraduate level, HKUST is launching what it calls HKUST AIX – a program placing students in companies to work on live AI problems. The arrangement is deliberately bilateral: students gain applied experience, but companies are learning from students who have, in Anseel’s phrase, “learned AI naturally.”
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Anseel is well aware of the anxiety running through the applicant market. He encounters it directly – at employer job fairs, in conversations with current students who have absorbed the headlines about AI eliminating white-collar work.
His response is to publish everything. Employment outcomes, program by program, salary data included, on LinkedIn and social media. The numbers he cites are from December 2025: 99% of HKUST Business School undergraduates have at least one job offer at graduation. 97% of MSc students are employed within three months. 97% of MBA students have a job upon graduation.
“Although it’s true they’re very nervous,” he says of his students, “I can only show the statistics.”
The employer landscape he describes is shifting but not collapsing. Traditional recruiters – JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, McKinsey – are still hiring, but the bar is higher: full AI fluency plus deep expertise in at least one domain. At the same time, a new category of recruiters has emerged on HKUST’s campus: mainland Chinese technology companies launching graduate and leadership development programs, competing for the same talent pool.
“For our students, although they’re very nervous because they hear all those stories, the employment outcomes are still very good,” Anseel says.
He is considerably less sanguine about the broader market. Without naming specific institutions or systems, Anseel describes a category of business school he believes faces genuine pain: those that spent the last decade chasing the MBA revenue model of large cohorts without investing in the brand equity or career infrastructure to justify it.
The specific mechanism he identifies is the international student ROI failure. Schools in Canada, the UK, Australia, and Europe recruited heavily from China and India, drawn by the revenue that international tuition generates. Most of those students returned home after graduating. But those schools, Anseel argues, had no understanding of the home job market, no local networks, no industry connections that would travel. The implicit promise of an international degree – that it confers an advantage back home – depended on employer recognition that, in many cases, simply wasn’t there.
“These students are basically left at their own devices,” he says. “They need to find their own way.”
The result is a recalculation happening at the family level. Students who went abroad returned to find that peers who stayed home, earned a degree from a well-networked local university, and built domestic industry connections were often better positioned. Parents are doing the arithmetic. The ROI argument that once justified the cost of an international MBA – the opportunity cost of leaving a career for one or two years, plus the fees – is no longer self-evident.
“The return is no longer guaranteed,” Anseel says, “except for a number of what I would call elite schools with very strong networks, very strong employer relationships.”
He believes HKUST is in that category, and he is direct about the investment required to stay there: deep employer relationships, genuine career services infrastructure, and employment outcomes transparent enough to withstand scrutiny. He is equally clear about what awaits the schools that treated the MBA as a volume business and skipped that investment: “For those that aim at large-scale cohorts and do not invest a lot in ROI and career services – I think it’s gonna be a bit painful.”
Perhaps the most striking element of Anseel’s medium-term vision is his explicit intention to reduce HKUST’s reliance on rankings as the primary currency of reputation.
“Rankings are a bit unpredictable,” he says. “You are at the mercy of ranking agencies that change their criteria – criteria that do not always fit what we’re good at.”
His proposed alternative metric: economic impact. HKUST’s parent university has already spun out more than 20 unicorns. Anseel wants the business school’s reputation to be built on the businesses its alumni create, the ventures it generates, and the influence its research has on economic policy and financial institutions – not on position in a table that may shift based on methodology changes.
“My prediction is that in 5 to 10 years, everyone will be looking at universities and business schools and asking: What type of prosperity are you generating? How many new businesses are you spinning out?”
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