Professor Adam Cross

Adam R. Cross is Professor of International Business, and currently serves as the Acting Associate Dean for Business Intelligence at the International Business School Suzhou (IBSS), 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 in IBSS, during which time the School became the youngest business school in the world to receive accreditation from the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) as well as by EQUIS. In 2018, Professor Cross joined the School of Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) as inaugural Head of the Department of International Relations (now the Department of International Studies), and in 2020 he became the Associate Dean for Learning and Teaching in the HSS School. From March 2023 to March 2026, Professor Cross served as Associate Vice-President for Education (AVP-E) and Academic Director of the Graduate School at XJTLU.

Before joining XJTLU, Professor Cross worked for 17 years at the Centre for International Business, University of Leeds (CIBUL), UK, and prior to that at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK, for a number of years. Before starting his academic career, Professor Cross worked in industry as an international commodities trader.

Across his thirty five-year career in Higher Education, Professor Cross has co-edited 5 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. His most recent book, entitled “Unleashing Innovation the East Asian Way”, was published by Springer Nature in May 2026. During his career, Professor Cross has contributed to more than 30 book chapters, supervised 14 PhD and 7 Masters 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 devised and launched with colleagues from 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, his 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. More recently, Professor Cross has been named as a Highly Cited Chinese Researcher each year from 2021 to 2025 by Elsevier for his contributions to the field of applied economics. His award in 2021 was the first time that any scholar from XJTLU had received this accolade since Elsevier began to publish its list in 2015, and he is the only scholar at XJTLU to have received this recognition five times. In 2025, Professor Cross’s 2019 paper entitled “The distinctiveness and diversity of entrepreneurial ecosystems in China, Japan, and South Korea: an exploratory analysis”, was chosen as one of the ten top papers published by Asian Business & Management (ABM) over the past 25 years, based on quality, impact, and contextualization. By April 2026, Professor Cross’s research has been cited more than 7,100 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.