'We want to bring Asia to Fountainbleau'

In Conversation

Gabriel Hawawini, currently Dean of INSEAD, will step down after six years but continue to be a part of the faculty. In an exclusive interview, he explains this global business school's success. Excerpts:

Most of the major global B-schools have a single campus, while INSEAD currently has two (in France and Singapore) with plans for more. Is this unique to INSEAD?

I would argue so. I think it would be fair to say that I cannot think of another school that operates in an integrated manner. There are schools which have programmes abroad or collaborations, but actually having a campus in another location, which is not a carbon copy of the original one, and then runnning the pair as an integrated structure "� I would argue that it is fairly unique.

Would you then be able to call it a multinational business school, quite the way like how you would describe a multinational corporation?

No, I would argue not. We are not for example in Asia primarily to train Asians. We are in Asia because we wanted to complement our presence there and raise our profile. We wanted to be in Asia because we wanted to bring Asia to Fountainebleau. That's why you see a lot of Asians here (in France); few of them in Singapore. You will see primarily Westerners there (in Singapore). And that is the spirit of what we are doing, that we would like to act as a bridge and through a campus structure provide an opportunity for non-Asians to experience Asia. So this is a model that says that you go and learn from the world, you have to be present around the world.

Another example is what we are doing in India (where it is setting up an entrepreneurship centre). The best way to observe entrepreneurs is to go out where they are and those entrepreneurs can happen to be anywhere in the world. And you have to be there and talk to them and understand what they are doing. Our role is to go there, capture that knowledge and circulate within the system and enrich the system. So if you go and study entrepreneurship in Israel for for example, what we are interested in is what are the start-ups doing to internationalise there. We now have have seed money to start a centre in India. What we would like to do is to see if there are any linkages that can be made between Israeli and Indian entrepreneurs.

I believe that Indians form the largest chunk among students?

That is the phenomenon that one sees in all top business schools. One of the reasons is that that there has been already a very large number of Indians outside of India who work in the financial services or consulting industry, who after a number of years want to go to a business school. By the way, you don't have the same phenomenon with China.