Adam R. Cross is a Professor of International Business and serves as Associate Vice-President for Education (AVP-E) and Director of the Graduate School at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (XJTLU).
Since joining XJTLU in 2013, Professor Cross has served in multiple roles. For more than four years he was Associate Dean for Learning and Teaching at International Business School Suzhou (IBSS), during which time IBSS became the youngest business school in the world to receive accreditation by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) as well as by EQUIS. In 2020, Professor Cross joined the School of Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) as Associate Dean for Learning and Teaching and the inaugural Head of the Department of International Relations (now the Department of International Studies). Before joining XJTLU, Professor Cross worked for 17 years at the Centre for International Business at the University of Leeds (CIBUL), UK, and at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK, for a number of years. Before starting his academic career, Professor Cross worked in industry as a commodities trader.
Across his thirty-year career in higher education, Professor Cross has co-edited four books (including one with Oxford University Press), and has published more than 35 peer-reviewed articles in leading international journals in their field, including the Journal of International Business Studies, Journal of World Business, International Business Review, Asian Business & Management, and Management International Review. Professor Cross has also contributed to 29 book chapters, supervised 13 doctoral and 7 master of research students to completion, acquired over one million GBP of research grant income, and led the design and launch of more than ten undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. The MA in International Business and Global Affairs that Professor Cross initiated and devised with colleagues in the Department of International Studies has become one of the most popular master’s programmes at XJTLU.
Professor Cross’s contributions to research have been recognized externally in a number of ways. In 2017, Professor Cross’s 2007 article co-authored with colleagues at CIBUL and titled “The determinants of Chinese outward foreign direct investment” was chosen for the prestigious Journal of International Business Studies (JIBS) Paper of the Decade Award. This award, sponsored by Palgrave Macmillan, is designed to recognise the most influential paper published in JIBS ten years previously. JIBS is the top ranked journal in the field of international business, is a FT50 (Financial Times top 50 journal), and is ranked as a 4* ‘World Elite’ journal in the Association of Business Schools’ Academic Journal Guide 2018. More recently, Professor Cross was named as a Highly Cited Chinese Researcher in 2021 and again in 2022 by Elsevier for his contributions to the field of applied economics. This was the first time that a scholar from XJTLU has received this accolade since Elsevier began to publish this list in 2015, and Professor Cross is the only scholar at XJTLU to have received this accolade twice. By 2023, Professor Cross’s research had been cited more than 5,750 times according to Google Scholar.
Professor Cross’s research focuses on the internationalisation of Asian multinational firms; Entrepreneurship and new technology-based firms, and start-up ecosystems in East Asia.
