Lee Quo Wei Professorship in Business
Professor Jiatao Li
Chair Professor, Department of Management
Director, Center for Business Strategy and Innovation
Chair Professor, HKUST Institute for Emerging Market Studies

While undertaking his undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering in the 1980s, Prof. Jiatao Li found himself becoming interested in the commercial side of the transportation companies he was studying. How did they meet customer demands? How did they deliver products? How did they add value to those products?

To sate this inquisitiveness, he enrolled on an MBA program at Portland State University, at age of 20, thus becoming one of the first students from Mainland China to undertake a master’s degree in business overseas. He followed this with a period in the commercial sector in Oregon, before undertaking his PhD in strategy and international management from the University of Texas (1992). This fascination with the mechanics of business has now led him to his current role as Senior Associate Dean at the School of Business and Management at HKUST, which he joined in 1997, following a stint with McKinsey & Company in Hong Kong.

Mentoring of students is an aspect of his role he sees as very important, so it is no surprise that under his leadership, the Department of Management is a five-time winner of HKUST Franklin Prize for Teaching Excellence Departmental Award. He has worked closely with around 20 PhD students over the last 10 years, enjoying the intellectual interactions as well as the pride that comes with seeing them spread out into the world as professors in their own right.

A leading expert in global business strategy, Prof. Li’s goal at the department is to build it into a center of excellence for business and management in the region, in terms of both research and teaching. Among the new initiatives is the integrated research opportunities program, which supports undergraduates in research projects to stimulate them to address intellectual challenges. A key area of research is examining how fast-growing startups can build leadership teams to take them into the next phase without losing their entrepreneurial spirit. He sees parallels with this and HKUST itself, which he believes has maintained the “can do” ethos of its very early days and remaining flexible while increasing in size.