Forge a Unique System of Management Technology
A school or college without sufficient financial resources can hardly achieve sustainable development. Its future depends on our foresight, as one cannot discern trends without grasping the essence of how things evolve. The essence of management as a discipline is its applied nature. Therefore, apart from basic operating funding for education, the financial strength of a school should come primarily from enterprises and society at large, rather than from government-funded research grants.
Public financial support for research, with the exception of research services procured by the state and public sector entities (including technological and public policy research), will be largely concentrated in the domain of public-good research. This includes fundamental scientific inquiry and purely intellectual, theoretical, and academic work related to human civilisation. Such research has no specific buyer, and its outcomes are freely shared with society. ome enterprises have been forced to shut down or restructure because they blurred the line between public-interest services and commercial services. Similarly, some local governments, due to the same confusion, have become heavily indebted and constrained on all fronts. If a school or university misjudges this trend, its fate will be no different. Hence, we must take precautionary measures before it is too late.
There are many differences between science and technology, but viewed through a commercial lens, some of these distinctions are particularly revealing.
Science is not subject to patents, whereas technology can be patented. Scientific research is essentially oriented towards the public good, while technological research is inherently commercial. Science concerns the laws of nature: these are discovered rather than invented, and they exist regardless of whether they are recognised. Technology, by contrast, is brought into being through invention; without human ingenuity, it would not exist. For that reason, the use of technology entails providing commercial returns to its inventors, which is precisely the purpose of the patent system. Seen in this light, what is particularly worth reflecting on is the economic logic behind this virtuous cycle: investment from public and private capital flows into technology, products, and services; enterprises generate profits and contribute taxes; the government channels part of this revenue into public-interest scientific research; and the discoveries made in turn propel technological advancement.
The practice-oriented nature of management as an academic discipline, together with the high market value of good managerial talent, means that education funding derived from government taxation and publicly allocated research grants is insufficient to cover the substantial costs required to attract and retain such high-calibre professionals in universities. To secure financial support from society and the corporate sector, management schools therefore need to develop their own core management technologies (i.e., codified, transferable, and commercially applicable management methods), which in turn enable them to attract talent, support theoretical and public-interest academic research, and ensure the sustainable development of the institution. Without such internally grounded management capabilities, the competitiveness of professional degree programmes remains weak. More broadly, any branch of management that lacks such technical support faces an uncertain and unsustainable future.
Among the various technological domains within management, decision-support technologies are those with particularly high commercial value. Herbert A. Simon—Nobel Laureate and Turing Award winner, and former professor at Carnegie Mellon University in both Computer Science and Psychology—famously argued that “management is decision-making.” For management schools, this perspective is arguably more significant than Peter F. Drucker’s well-known view that “management is practice.” With advances in artificial intelligence and the ongoing process of digital transformation, an increasing number of decisions in enterprises and society at large will rely on digital simulation and modelling systems for support. Management schools therefore need to demonstrate and substantiate their value through a robust digital decision-support technology system. Only by establishing an integrated system of digital decision-making technologies can they generate proprietary intellectual assets under their own control, break down disciplinary boundaries, pool resources, and clarify strategic value orientations. This, in turn, is essential for securing sufficient financial resources, managing the mobility of talent, and building institutional brand identity and core competitiveness. Such a management technology system serves as a leverage point for interdisciplinary development and industry–education integration within the discipline.
Establishing such a management technology system requires a deep understanding of managerial practice, as well as the ability to abstract key variables and essential elements, develop system modelling capabilities, apply principles and technologies of artificial intelligence, and build simulation- and scenario-based experimental platforms. It also requires the capacity to develop branding and service capabilities oriented towards society and the market. This, in turn, necessitates systematic research and development—conducted in collaboration with enterprises and other stakeholders—on issues such as the purpose of decision-making, decision models, data sources and alternative options, evaluation methods, and outcome simulation. Management schools must therefore possess strong research and development capabilities in these areas. To date, insufficient attention has been paid to questions such as “who are our research outputs intended for?” and “who will be the end users or beneficiaries of our research?” Much of our research remains broadly oriented towards undefined users and takes the form of public-interest academic work, largely because our primary funding sources are non-commercial public grantswith no direct economic return. When such funding can no longer serve as a meaningful source of personal income for researchers, and when its scale and usage patterns increasingly fail to meet the needs of academic staff, it becomes necessary to recalibrate the school’s l structure, research orientation, and resource allocation mechanisms. Management is both a science and an art; however, in an era in which artificial intelligence is reshaping the world, its technological dimension deserves far greater emphasis. Management technology will constitute a key source of competitive advantage for institutions. This is not only an emerging trend, but an inevitable reality.
