Research Focus
Research Institutes and Centres
IBSS has strongly supported the growth of a variety of research institutes and centres over the past decade, in addition to various labs and other resources that promote both impactful research and interdisciplinary collaboration. A full description of these institutes, centres and labs can be found below.
Operational and Supply Chain Excellence Institute (OSCE)
Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University established the Operational and Supply Chain Excellence Institute (OSCE) in early 2017, in order to more actively provide technology and management services for economic and social development.
Research within the OSCE focuses on developing and testing innovative approaches that can be implemented in companies to meet these challenges and optimise how they operate to establish a competitive edge.
With its location, expertise and network of companies, the institute is well-placed to work with a wide range of industrial partners across the Suzhou SIP district, an area home to tens of thousands of cutting-edge firms. The aim is to generate approaches that can be tailored to assist businesses across a wide range of industry sectors and related services. The overall aim of the OSCE is to establish and cultivate the region as a hub of expertise and excellence that can be marketed to attract more enterprises.
Centre for Responsible and Sustainable Business Education (CRSBE)
The Centre for Responsible and Sustainable Business Education (CRSBE) aims to support and promote International Business School Suzhou (IBSS) as a leading business school in China, committed to developing the transformative capacity of students to develop higher values and become responsible global citizens. Through collaboration with multiple partners and stakeholders, CRSBE prioritizes the development of critical thinking, ethical compass, empathy, creativity, and problem-solving skills in students, guided by the principles of responsible management education and sustainable business development. CRSBE is committed to developing and educating future business management talents with a strong sense of social responsibility and the ability to change, and to promoting IBSS that is responsible and sustainable business education by providing a platform to collaborate with different stakeholders, enhancing the social impact and exporting more social value of IBSS.
Dedicated to promoting and fulfilling the objectives of the UN Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME) initiative, the CRSBE was integral to the establishment and promotion of the “PRME China Academic Committee”, the “First PRME China Academic Committee Meeting and PRME Chapter China”, the Special Session of Education Forum for Asia “Responsible Management and Youth Development Education”, the Stockholm 50+ Lecture Series, as well as the series of translation work on the Frontiers of Responsible Management Education. Further to its work promoting international research and awareness, the centre develops and hosts seminars, domestic and international competitions, and corporate research and study opportunities for IBSS students.
Society for the Advancement in Economic Studies (SAES)
The Society for the Advancement in Economic Studies (SAES) aims to become one of the leading economic studies research institutions in China, with its mission to provide an interdisciplinary research platform bringing together scholars, business community and policy makers to understand, debate and solve the practical problems related to economics.
Economics is a broad discipline with specialisation in various fields of microeconomics and macroeconomics. There is a growing consensus on the need to amalgamate various aspects of economic studies to better understand and solve problems within specific economies and the world as a whole. Moreover, in today’s integrated and interconnected world, other social science disciplines have applied ideas and methodologies found within economics and become crucial to effective and integrated economic policy formulation.
It is the goal of SAES to apply the economics toolbox both to overlapping internal fields and neighbouring disciplines, thereby taking advantage of synergies across the social sciences and stimulating the generation of new knowledge. The research activities and outcomes of the society are expected to contribute to policy creation, and to this end the society organises annual conferences inviting scholars from across the world to present papers on a wide variety of subject areas.
W.E.leader Centre for Mindfulness
The W.E.leader Centre for Mindfulness originated from an innovative project funded by IBSS and was founded in 2021 with a generous external donation. The vision of the Centre is to support the rapid growth of the mindfulness industry in China through the unique perspective of XJTLU, ultimately leading to a happier and more responsible life for the Chinese people, while also facilitating understanding between east and west. The Centre’s scope of work is a triangle that consists of Research, Teaching and Community. In terms of research, the Centre not only conducts academic research but also conducts industry research and provides consultancy services. For teaching, the Centre offers scientifically proved program, such as MBCT and MBSR, and also design new intervention programs that aim at solving other problems. W.E.leader is a mindfulness-based leadership community affiliated with the Centre made up of internal and external stakeholders and volunteers to carry out the Centre’s vision and goals. There are three layers of meaning for the “W.E.” in W.E.leader, namely “West and East”, “Wisdom Explorer”, and the adoption of a WE mindset instead of ME mindset. The community organises events and projects to create social impact following the principle of “By Community, For Community”.
Centre for Fintech Studies (CFTS)
While finance academics are aware of the vast potential for machine-learning (ML) models to test intriguing new research questions, they generally lack the computational resources and technical knowledge to apply ML models in an efficient manner that can also convince journal editors, referees and industry practitioners on the reliability of their ML model results. The CFTS acts as a platform to consolidate all FinTech-related research activities within the Department of Finance at IBSS. The CFTS has two objectives, the first of which is to gather together the school’s research on machine-learning applications in the core Finance research areas of Corporate Finance, Asset Pricing and Financial Markets. Secondly, the Centre was created to serve as a platform for interactions between academic staff and relevant stakeholders, specifically academics and industry practitioners in the field of Data Science. Fulfilling these two objectives enables the CFTS to enhance the efficiency of FinTech-related projects implemented at IBSS.
Smart Mobility Analytics Centre (SMAC)
Building on a solid research foundation and wide network of academics and industry leaders, the Smart Mobility Analytics Centre (SMAC) was established at IBSS in May 2022. The vision of SMAC is to be a leading platform on smart mobility analytics that will synergise the insights and needs of academic research, industry and education. The SMAC’s strategic objectives are to (a) Promote interdisciplinary and cutting-edge academic research on smart mobility analytics, (b) Establish close collaborative relationships with companies in the mobility sector, and (c) Explore opportunities to contribute to the school’s executive education programmes, as well as undergraduate/postgraduate student projects in the domain of mobility and transport. The SMAC consists of more than 30 members, with these including IBSS faculty and postgraduate students, non-IBSS XJTLU faculty and students, international researchers from the Centre’s research network, and industry advisors. For more information on the SMAC, please visit the dedicated website here.
IBSS Biometrics Lab
Biometrics allows researchers to better understand the neuro-physiological-psychological reasons that underpin people’s behaviour; what do they do, and why they do it. The IBSS Biometrics Lab is home to state-of-the-art facilities that are able to measure emotions, eye movements, skin conductance and brain activity. The Biometrics Lab facilitates and welcomes research from different disciplines.
IBSS Experimental Economics Lab
Experimental economics has become one of the most successful and fastest-growing fields of economics in the last several decades. It is a subfield of economics that uses experiments to explore human behavior, tests economic theories and suggests new models to better capture human behavior by providing more psychologically plausible foundations. At the IBSS Experimental Economics Lab, researchers are able to conduct a wide variety of experiments based on their individual research interests. Through participation in lab experiments, students are able to change economic factors within a specifically designed economic environment and achieve specific monetary outcomes related to their choices. With respect to teaching, classroom lab experiments are especially useful and helpful when learning about complex concepts such as individual decision-making, corporate strategy and game theory. Consistent with research-led teaching, students may further develop their research interests by running lab experiments for their dissertations.
Bloomberg Finance Lab
Equipped with Bloomberg Terminals, the Bloomberg Finance Lab allows professors to bring the real world into the classroom and provides students with the same platform used by the world’s leading banks, corporations and government agencies, allowing them to enhance their academic studies across a wide range of disciplines. Our Bloomberg Finance Lab allows students to monitor and analyze a vast amount of real-time news, market data and even earn their Bloomberg certification, which is just one of many ways we help our students gain real-world skills to stand out in the job market.
Refinitiv Financial Lab
This lab provides a widely-used database and platform in the financial industry, via which students can access company financial data and economic indicators and news, analytics, and productivity tools. These contents can equip students with professional knowledge and practices in the industry, such as Datastream, Workspace (previous Eikon platform), and Bloomberg. By self-studying the well-defined training modules/videos provided by Refinitiv (the previous Thomson Reuters) and Bloomberg, students have opportunities to obtain the three certificates (i.e., Bloomberg, Datastream, and Workspace certificates) after successfully passing online tests. This database training will enhance students’ macro and micro-analytical abilities based on current (real-time) and historical financial and economic data across global economies and financial markets.
Digital Accounting Lab
The Digital Accounting Lab (DALab) aims to strengthen research and innovate teaching methods in accounting. Its main focus is on the use of digital technologies such as machine learning and natural language processing to support accounting research and teaching. The DALab will develop a series of projects to apply the latest digital technologies to accounting research and teaching.
Three high-performance workstations with GPU provide computing power for the machine learning models and natural language process (NLP) models. DALab provides computing support for IBSS researchers with GPU computing requests for their machine learning, deep learning, or NLP models.
Computational Economics and Finance Laboratory
Computational Economics and Finance Lab is built to provide significant computational power for teaching and research within IBSS. It located in BS429 with four Dell OptiPlex 7000 Desktops. Three of them have 32GB DDR4 and one 128GB DDR4. These machines can complete the small-scale but already computational expensive tasks locally in IBSS with no need to apply for the centralized computation power. Faculty members can access to the lab by staff card and log in terminals by university credentials. In addition, our PhD students, master students, SURF and FYP students can access this lab too wither permission from their supervisors.
As a research-led school, IBSS excels across many areas of management, economics, accounting and finance.
IBSS Research Clusters
The school aims to harness and enhance existing areas of research expertise among IBSS academic staff by identifying specific research clusters as well as a number of schools and university-level research centres. These research clusters are further enhanced through staff and PhD student recruitment, and research funding. Below is a list of priority research clusters:
Accounting and Finance (ACF)
Economics (ECO)
Management (MAN)
Examples of our Impactful Research
Research in Top Journals
Over the past five years (2018-2023), IBSS academic staff have published a number of research papers in the following top-tier ABS4/ABDC-A* journals:
Conferences
Over the past five years (2018-2023), IBSS academic staff have presented their research at elite conferences, with these including but not limited to: