From Mark Zuckerberg to Bill Gates, from Steve Jobs to Oprah Winfrey, the myth of the successful college dropout is a potent one. If you have the creativity and vision to be an entrepreneur, the logic goes, why go to university when you can learn by doing?

Taking research out of the classroom and into the real world can yield commercial, social and educational value.

From the Imperial Academy in ancient China that equipped the emperor with bureaucrats to Western Europe’s first university in Bologna, Italy, around 1,000 years later, the earliest universities had no need to move with the times. They were repositories of a largely unchanging body of knowledge centred on religion, spirituality and supporting the status quo.

From the Imperial Academy in ancient China that equipped the emperor with bureaucrats to Western Europe’s first university in Bologna, Italy, around 1,000 years later, the earliest universities had no need to move with the times. They were repositories of a largely unchanging body of knowledge centred on religion, spirituality and supporting the status quo.

Far from the legend of the college dropout, a business school education can help entrepreneurs succeed, whether their enterprise is brand new or generations old. From Mark Zuckerberg to Bill Gates, from Steve Jobs to Oprah Winfrey, the myth of the successful college dropout is a potent one. If you have the creativity and vision to be an entrepreneur, the logic goes, why go to university when you can learn by doing?

Taking research out of the classroom and into the real world can yield commercial, social and educational value. One of the greatest challenges for any application developer is live testing – observing how their product functions in the real world, then refining it in line with user responses. Using universities and their communities as live “testbeds” can benefit not only academics and students, but society as a whole.

Take a peek at the bestselling titles in the business section of a bookstore and you will find a slew of books dispensing tips on being a good boss, daring to lead, or even adapting principles from the battlefield to win control of the boardroom. Mastering good leadership, in a time when major corporations remain dominated by cults of personality, is a perennial fixation for those striving to build a successful business.

When Professor Chandran Kukathas recalls his time as an undergraduate in the 1970s, he remembers what he describes as rather carefree days, despite having considerably fewer available resources compared to students of this era. “There were many inconveniences back then, including the problem of getting access to readings in a world without the internet, PDF files and digital journals. What I most envy of my students now is how much material is at their fingertips,” he said.

In a bid to create a future-ready Singapore, SMU and Alibaba Cloud have joined forces to launch a series of courses to upskill Singaporeans and get us Smart Nation ready.

In recent years, e-commerce, data analytics, artificiaI intelligence and machine learning have made the quantum leap from being mere buzzwords to real revenue-generating technologies: a fact borne out by a 2018 study by US management consultancy Bain & Co which found that digitalisation could grow the Asean gross domestic product by an estimated SGD 1 trillion by 2025.