Dr. ir. Ying Zhang

When I thought about the question of who I am, the first role I am very proud of being is "a mum". I have two lovely daughters and one son. They have been giving me lots of inspiration and love to enjoy and be beloved as a mom every day.  I consider myself an educator, being honored to study, teach, and learn from my students of different ages, from 20 to 70. This role blesses me to have a chance in the fast learning curve and be appreciated with such a destiny. Thirdly, I am very very lucky to be a scientist in the economic and management fields, working with many excellent scholars and practitioners, and allowing me to overview the phenomena across countries over centuries. I enjoyed very much my role as an education entrepreneur in the business education sector, being an associate dean at one of the top business schools in the world, and had the opportunity later to start my own school (singularity academy). The chance for me to work in such a role has significantly pushed up my capability and helped me understand the necessity of the ecosystem and the meaning of looking after stakeholders. Finally, as a Traditional Chinese Medicine practitioner in Europe, I cherish and honor each moment where I can help patients recover, especially those who are mothers being burned out and exhausted from heavy duty from both work and family.

 

Over years as someone taking many roles in parallel, I always remind myself of the importance of being humble and being of self-consciousness. It indeed takes a long time to learn how to be the retrospective and same time to be looking forward. From my studies in Buddhism and Taoism, I have learned to connect myself to others and their environment and learned to self-improve through reflection and being proactive. The process is of high correspondence in each of the leadership roles for which I have been responsible.

 

As a mother, I have learned a lot from my children.  Vice versa, I believe my children also learned from me and my surroundings the importance of being strong and positive. They give me endless strength and allow me to exploit my intelligence and invest it in other fields for my students, my research, and my stakeholders. This gives me the chance to draw my research interests from my days learning from them, and connect them to my self-development process. My teaching is fortunately inspired by my research and my students, across different sectors and across different ages.  Thanks to the eco-system which I believe and my self-training each day, my work stakeholders are able to also benefit from my experience.

 

I owe my appreciation to my multi-background and my growing circumstances. My parents gave up lots for me and supported me to be academically educated in the top universities in China, Europe, and the USA. My interests over decades gave me enormous energy to learn from engineering, economics, and management fields, as well as having the chance to work with elite figures, people, and institutions from different fields and countries.; From my own ups and downs I learned to deeply appreciate what I have been given and am grateful to the system for developing me as a global "broker" and "integrator". 

 

As an educator, I teach multiple courses, such as entrepreneurship (including domains of economics, corporate, social, cognition, and well-being), Innovation management, Chinese Economy and Business, etc. I also design and teach  Happiness and Spirituality applied in Daily life.  As a researcher, my research interests cover both macro and micro levels, from both an academic and practice angle. At a macroeconomic level, I study the economic transition and entrepreneurship development. At an organizational level, I look at both advanced countries and emerging countries’ corporate entrepreneurship and latecomers’ catching up with the process, as well as globalization and localization of organizational culture. At an individual level, I look into the interactive system of entrepreneurial cognition, emotion, entrepreneurial brain reward, and entrepreneurship education from an entrepreneurial and neuroscience perspective. My other research interests include social entrepreneurship, higher education management, and business school development. Supported by my research, I supervise master's and doctorate students' cross-disciplinary studies of economics, business administration, entrepreneurship, innovation, catching up, globalization, and business school development.

 

My opinions and work have been widely cited by media in the USA, China, and Europe, including Bloomberg, Financial Times, China Daily, China Policy Review, CaixinOnline, EuroBiz, EFMD GlobalFocus, AACSB, the NativeSoceity, CKGSB Knowledge, Eureporter, China Radio International, Rush Hour (Radio in the USA), TED, Harvard Business Review, Harvard Economics Review, etc.  I personally promote the relevance of academic research and argue for a reverse contribution from practice to the academic. I was frequently invited to give speeches and comment at international industry forums, fund investment meetings, cross-continent economic dialogues, and organizational-level consulting forums. I am also dedicated to studying business school development across cultures. Being an education entrepreneur, I am also a business developer,  ever helped multiple research institutes and centers to set up and develop, such as ACE (Alliance of 20 Chinese and European Business schools) in Europe, the Global Research Institute of Logistics and Supply Chain (Chinese government think tank in the logistic sector) in Beijing-Rotterdam, the Shanghai Free-trade Zone Case Development Center in Shanghai, Erasmus-Huawei Collaboration Program in Amsterdam, New Silk Road Group in the Netherlands, and Identitat Forum in Switzerland.