[FISF-Said CEO Oxford Module] Anchoring a Global Vision at the Forefront of Change | Info

Release time：2025-07-24    

The “FISF-Saïd Global CEO Program” jointly founded by Fudan International School of Finance and Saïd Business School, Oxford University was officially launched in January 2025. Surveying the global political-economic landscape and the migration of economic power in combination with an insight into the new learning needs of both Chinese and foreign entrepreneurs, the two-year program gathers world-leading courses and faculties and provides opportunities for two-way exchange and learning between eastern and western economies. Integrating global finance, cutting-edge technology, humanities, and business ethics, it aims to empower entrepreneurs to thoroughly understand the essence of business, grasp financial logic, lead innovation and change and implement practical management, and to cultivate leaders with global perspectives and forward-looking thinking as well as innovation spirits and humanistic care.

From July 12^th and July 20^th, the Oxford Module of the “FISF-Saïd Global CEO Program” started in the UK. By probing deep into the cultural landmarks and visiting top leading enterprises in both Oxford and London, students systematically deconstructed the technological breakthroughs, industrial reforms and capital logic in global uncertainty, and developed a global vision with both strategic resilience and humanistic depth.

An insight into global uncertainty and macro pattern

Professor Chris Kutarna from Oxford Martin School gave a talk on “major uncertainties”, which was an extensive reflection on this subject previously taught in Hong Kong, China. At Oxford, he once again led the students to observe the global situations in the last few months and new dynamics of enterprise development, and examined the dynamic balance among technology, politics and business from the long-cycle perspective through cases and interactive discussions.

He analyzed a number of cutting-edge reforms such as the acceleration of the energy revolution, the breakthroughs in food technology, the division of AI governance and the great leap in material science, as well as other issues like the decreased stability of global geopolitics, the tendency of western countries to carry on “de-risking”, security anxiety and the continuous threat of uncertainty caused by geopolitical conflict stalemate. He stressed that: in the time of restructured rules, there is more strategic value in the ability of identification than in technology itself, so enterprises need to pay attention to the cross-impact between technology and rules and gain the first-mover advantage.

Chris Kutarna wished the students could obtain abundant reflection and sedimentation of ideas from the Oxford Module. He held that the value of learning lay more in the deep thinking of experience. Having an insight into a series of macro issues about the future, people will understand that uncertainty is actually not an impediment to action. Just as explorers in history could still get to new regions based on wrong maps, leaders can also march forward decisively in the unknown with an open mind. In the class, he asked everyone to write a letter to “themselves in a year” to clarify their current cognition, plans and original aspirations, laying an anchor point for growth and iteration when they returned to Oxford next time.

Mungo Wilson, a professor in finance at Saïd Business School, Oxford University, gave a speech entitled Global Uncertainty and Investment Pattern, explaining to the students the investment logic in global economic changes through analysis in various dimensions like the economic trend, population structure, debt risks and investment strategies. By comparing the GDP changes of major economies in the world ever since 1980, he disclosed the core contradiction that caused differentiation of growth drivers for developed economies. Population structure is one of the key variables: the decline in the proportion of working age population and the intensification of aging will constrain economic vitality, while the immigration policy in the US maintains the demographic dividend, thereby supporting economic growth. Another focus is the debt issue: data shows that the proportion of government debt to GDP in many countries has exceeded the warning line, and that the cost of debt repayment has surged in the high interest rate environment. The debt overhang effect will suppress investment and growth.

According to investment strategies, Mungo Wilson analyzed the difference between the two types of investors, “the short-sighted type” and “the strategic type”. Apart from seeking the maximization of expected returns, the latter also takes into consideration long-term elements. Based on an insight into the investment of Oxford University in real estate, research and sustainable assets, he suggested that enterprises should focus on population trends and debt risks so as to handle uncertainty with diversified and strategic asset allocation.

Trends in the future and frontiers in the field

In the course of The Future of Biopharmaceuticals, Joachim Thraen, Government Affairs Strategic Leader, Expert in Innovation, China and Geopolitics and Lecturer, interpreted “the innovation, uncertainty and opportunities in a fragmented world - insights and action priorities of CEO”. As he predicted, the scale of the global biopharmaceutical industry would reach 740 billion dollars in 2030, the growth drive coming from rigid demands like personalized healthcare, breakthroughs in chronic disease therapies and population aging. At the technology level, artificial intelligence would spread across the whole chain from medicine research and development, production to delivery. Industry 4.0 automation is revolutionizing conventional production models; Global industrial innovation hubs have been formed in Boston, San Francisco, Basel, and the Yangtze River Delta / Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Urban Agglomeration / Greater Bay Area in China, taking the lead in the fields of intelligent manufacturing and digital health.

In terms of geopolitics and supervision, Joachim Thraen pointed out that the biopharmaceutical industry deeply relies on the global supply chain, and on-site investigation also shows that enterprises are commonly concerned about the supply chain risks brought by trade barriers, great power rivalry and economic nationalism. He believed China is a fertile land for innovation, and that leaders should deal with blockdown through diversified layout, regional cooperation, regulatory synergy leveraging and other strategies, including uncertainty into strategic scenario planning; concentrate on investment opportunities in fields of precision medicine and AI drug discovery to grasp the potentials of ASEAN and other emerging markets, and also balance risks and innovation with resilient thinking, as “the future belongs to practitioners who have both insights and resilience”.

Bruno Roche, Founder of Economics of Mutuality and Former Chief Economist of Mars, took the theme of Common Prosperity - the next frontier of value creation as the core and discussed how technological reforms drive enterprises to surpass profit maximization and construct a fairer and more efficient model of mutuality-based capitalism (Economics of Mutuality). He stated that for decades the traditional economic theory of “shareholder primacy” had built an empire of business, but on the other hand torn the social fabric, consuming environmental resources far beyond the carrying capacity of the Earth. The intensification of inequality has given rise to systemic instability.

He proposed that enterprises must realize a balance between financial capital and non-financial capital including human capital (employee welfare), social capital (ecological trust) and natural capital (sustainable environment), rather than merely seeking short-term profit. Depending on his observations on Mars, Novo Nordisk, the Kibera Slum Upgrading Project in Kenya, and the “common prosperity” mode of Chinese enterprises, he called on companies to shift their behavior from Value Extraction to Ecosystem Creation and achieve profitability by coming up with creative solutions to social and environmental pain points. If enterprises can rediscover their original covenant, empower disadvantaged groups within their supply chains, and integrate traditional wisdom with modern technology to solve local problems, they will be able to strike a genuine balance between reasonable profit and social value.

Marc Ventresca, a professor in strategic management at Saïd Business School, Oxford University, expounded the Global Commercial Space Economy from social and strategic perspectives and revealed the opportunities and constraints in space as a new economic frontier. He mentioned that so far the global space economy has a scale of 470 billion dollars and is estimated to exceed 1 trillion dollars by 2040. Such growth originates from the transformation from “the old space” (led by the government) to “the new space” (driven by business). With participants more and more diversified, and government investment still being the dominant force, public policies and geopolitics are of great significance to the industry. On the other hand, through a series of cases like “The Tragedy of the Commons”, SpaceX and Astroscale, he presented issues of a lack of international regulatory framework and unclear rights and responsibilities also existing in space activities.

Marc Ventresca reckoned that innovation ecology and cross-departmental collaboration were the keys to solving the issues. Integration of the strengths of research, development, industry and policies can generate powerful technological combinations and organizational capabilities. He reminded that space economy would reshape the pattern of communications, logistics and energy, but its value highland might possibly lie in service providers and agencies rather than direct technology providers, just as the saying that “the most profitable people in the gold rush may be those who sell shovels”. Only by taking account of compatibility (avoiding technology monopoly), sustainability (solving the trash issue) and strategic stability (balancing commerce and geopolitical security) at the same time can enterprises successfully stride across from “exploration” to “inclusive value creation”.

Macro trends and technological reforms

Dr. Lydia Kostopoulos, Expert in Strategy, Emerging Technology and Innovation and Author of The Imagination Dilemma, brought two courses of Imagination in the Age of Exponential Convergence and Population Statistics, illustrating the intertwined challenges of the technology explosion and population structure reform, as well as how to tackle future challenges based on policy innovation, cross-generational collaboration and technology ethics.

To analyze the route of technological reforms, Lydia Kostopoulos put forward a “6D Model” (digitized, deceiving, disruptive, demonetized, dematerialized and democratized). She emphasized that with the marginal cost of technology approaching zero, technology convergence (such as AI, the Internet of Things, blockchain and gene editing) is reshaping business modes and generating whole new value chains. In the context of technology inclusion, enterprises should be on the alert for linear thinking, but rather pursue “massive transformative purposes (MTP)”, and construct core competitiveness with interdisciplinary imagination to identify convergence trends and create innovative solutions.

When it came to the interactive influence between population structure changes and technology and society, Lydia Kostopoulos noted that the reality of population required organizations to redesign the cross-generation collaboration mechanism and balance technical efficiency and social compatibility. She listed out a series of multi-dimensional measures that had been taken around the world to deal with aging challenges and the sharp drop of birth rates, including the anti-age discrimination mechanism set up in France, and the retraining plan for people over 40 years old in Singapore at the policy level; the labor gap filling with robots in Japan’s manufacturing industry and the widespread application of AI’s automated handling of administrative processes at the technical level; and the longevity therapy (like DNA editing and cell reprogramming) that is expected to elongate humans’ “healthy lifespan”, reducing the consumption of chronic diseases on the healthcare system, and etc at the scientific level. As for the challenge of labor shortage, she advised enterprises to utilize automation widely, invest in the health prevention system jointly with the government, bridge the digital divide and cultivate the “longevity thinking” by encouraging employees to conduct health management, thus making long-term contributions to the society altogether.

In his class entitled Development of Nuclear Fusion Energy, Innovative Thought Leader Professor Mark Dodgson explained its critical potentials, technological challenges and the global competition pattern, particularly focusing on the opportunities and responsibilities of China. Against the background of global climate crisis and violent fluctuations in energy prices, nuclear fusion energy is expected to become a major energy source for sustainable development with its core advantages of being clean, controllable, renewable, efficient and abundant in storage. However, the business transformation of nuclear fusion energy is one of the most complicated engineering challenges in history, which requires solving a series of difficulties at the same time, including heat extraction, material tolerance and equipment maintenance.

Mark Dodgson shared one of the largest and most influential international scientific research cooperation projects in the world, ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor). China has taken a deep participation in the project as a founding member, and also formulated the “three-step” nuclear energy development strategy and the roadmap for controllable nuclear fusion, gradually transforming from a technology follower to a leader depending on its supply chain advantage and policy support for building an innovative ecosystem. Mark Dodgson believed that China has what it needs to be a global energy innovation superpower, but still needs to properly handle issues like start-up enterprise cultivation, long-term investment risks and industry-university-research collaboration. Nuclear fusion is not just an energy solution, and its derivative technology can promote multi-domain innovations like medical laser, robots, new materials, and etc. And China will take on a key leading role in the process of accelerating the commercialization of nuclear fusion technology and realizing global sustainable development.

Debbie Hopkins, a professor in human geography at Kellogg’s College, Oxford University, focused on the Changing Trends and Strategic Opportunities in the field of Transportation in his class, emphasizing the importance of pushing forward multi-scale collaboration and fair transformation. As a global social technical system, transportation has both complexity and unfairness: 4% of the global population often go around by plane, accounting for over 50% of the aviation emission, while resource pollution and traffic injuries are mainly borne by margin groups; meanwhile, due to the reliance on infrastructure, vested interests and consumption habits, fuel-power vehicles and other high-carbon travel modes make it extremely hard to make systematic reforms.

Debbie Hopkins made a general introduction of core trends such as the urbanization and smart governance in transportation, sustainability and decarbonization, post-pandemic travel transformation and supply chain resilience, etc. She also proposed the “ASI Frame” (Avoid-Shift-Improve) as a core route of decarbonization: avoiding non-essential travels, shifting to low-carbon modes and improving technological upgrading. She claimed to resolve the impasse through cross-scalar, multi-subject collaboration, such as unified global technical standards, regional policy coordination and the combination of national strategic investment and local smart infrastructure. In the meantime, people should be alert to the imbalance in the distribution of technological dividends and ensure that the transformation gives equal considerations to efficiency, fairness, and ecological sustainability.

Regional economy and business environment

In his analysis on African Economy and its Business Environment, Professor Alex Money, Chief Researcher of Smith School of Business and Environment, Oxford University and Founder-in-Residence, highlighted that opportunities in Africa lie in the combination of population, resources, and technology, but still need to break through structural obstacles of infrastructure and financial sustainability. Africa has a population expansion rarely seen worldwide, and is estimated to double its population and triple the number of middle-income groups, with a high proportion of youngsters, developing a huge foundation for consumption and innovation. In terms of resources, Africa occupies about 65% of the world’s undeveloped arable land and key mineral resources. This natural endowment is reshaping the global value chain. Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zambia have been initiating development transformation, turning resource dividends into high value-added employment and industrial chain construction. In terms of technology, Africa has demonstrated the ability to transcend traditional stages of development in the mobile sector, seizing new tracks like renewable energy while reducing infrastructure costs.

Alex Money also mentioned that Africa is now faced with a “super period” opportunity, with the emergence of a huge infrastructure investment gap of trillions of dollars. But as different countries show significant differences in risk returns, differentiated investment strategies must be adopted to prevent the risk of single dependence. Enterprises need to grasp cross-domain integration opportunities and get hold of the key to the super period in the demographic dividend window, resource value chain upgrading and technological inter-generation gap.

Nourishing global perspectives in history and civilization

During the module, the students explored British civilization landmarks along the historical context, to experience the blend of tradition and modernity and inject humanistic depth into business thinking. In Oxford, they walked into the largest private estate in the UK - the Blenheim Palace, to have a look at the strategic vision and family inheritance of the great leader and understand the resilience of leadership traveling through time; they strolled around the Oxford campus and visited Ashmolean Museum guided by Pegram Harrison, a senior researcher in entrepreneurship at Saïd Business School, where they observed how the classical academic hall and cutting-edge laboratory confirmed the academic path of “tradition nourishing innovation” and presented the historical trajectory of east-west integration. In London, the Rosetta Stone Monument in the British Museum and the royal style of Buckingham Palace opened up diverse perspectives in the context of globalization and also brought a profound understanding of the diversity of art and civilization.

Enterprise visit: from smart manufacturing to financial strategies

In Oxford, the students visited MINI Plant and Bletchley Park to feel from a close distance their efficient production system in the era of Industry 4.0, exploration of the transformation of future travel modes, as well as the spiritual source of cryptanalysis holy land and AI; at the Embankment Office of PwC in London, Suwei Jiang, Chief Partner of PwC UK Greater China and Southeast Asia Business Group, and Bingbing Tao, PwC UK Strategy Economics Advisor, respectively shared their opinions in aspects of the overview of the UK economy and new industry strategy, global asset allocation and UK tax characteristics, analyzing the investment environment and industry opportunities in UK; later the students walked into Goldman Sachs Apex Family Office, where Darren Allaway, Managing Director of Goldman Sachs Apex Family Office Business and Head of European, Middle Eastern and African Regions, and Analyst Marvin Chedid shared Goldman Sachs’ frontier practice in global wealth management, and introduced how it provides global trade flow and customized service paradigm for ultra-high net worth families.

Students’ experience

Saïd Business School, Oxford University is a world leading business school. The course I took here has given me a new understanding of the relationship between corporate mission and profit, as well as the mutual benefit economy:

Firstly: For a company, mission should be the polestar rather than a mere decoration. The core value of a company lies in solving the pain points of the society. If taking profit maximization as the only goal, the company will be trapped in homogeneous competition in the long run despite the profit earned in the short run, just like pulling the cart with your head down so focused on the effort that you lose your way. Under the guidance of mission, we can be promoted to step on the correct and frontier track - mutual benefit economy.

Secondly: profit is the “natural result” when demands are met. It is commonly recognized among entrepreneurs that “profit is the gauge that validates the viability of a mission”, which indicates that profit must be an attachment if a company successfully creates values.

Thirdly: the sense of mission condenses entrepreneurs. Mission and profit are actually the two sides of the same coin. Mission defines why a company exists while profit verifies if the mission can sustain.

- Xiang Xia

Through the course, I’m aware of the tremendous changes currently taking place in the global population structure: first is the acceleration of longevity, meaning centenarians will become a normal state with the number of centenarians worldwide estimated to increase by 8 times and reach 3.7 million in 2050; second is the continuous decrease of birth rates, which will be even lower than the renewal of the populations; and third is the labor structure crisis arising from the aforementioned two points, leading developed countries to a severe labor shortage.

The decrease of birth rates is a global phenomenon spreading across various cultures, which cannot be stopped even with fiscal incentive mechanisms. There has been an increasingly larger gap in the consciousness and opinions between the two genders. As modern people have longer lifespan, our healthy life expectancy (disease-free survival) fail to improve synchronously. For companies, both opportunities and dangers hide in these changes, so the following key points may need to be specially noted: firstly, the health industry will become a new economic growth point; secondly, anti-aging research might possibly overturn the normal concept that “biological aging is irreversible”; and thirdly, a forward-looking layout of industries related to longevity will bring about dominant advantages in other industries.

All in all, the dramatic changes in demographic structure requires comprehensive response. Individuals, companies and the government need to coordinate with one another in restructuring the “longevity-ready society” to adapt to long-lived population of higher quality, which will be the cornerstone of sustainable prosperity.

Zihao Jin

The courses of Saïd Business School, Oxford University this time covers a wide span, which benefit me a lot! I have deeply experienced the learning tradition of Oxford, “interdisciplinary intersection and integration”.

In the course of Changing Trends and Strategic Opportunities in the field of Transportation, the core is about “linkage”. The professor discussed several essential driving factors, including electrification, shared mobility, automatic driving and carbon neutrality, and emphasized the synergistic effect among policies, technology and behavior changes. He pointed out that enterprises should seize the strategic opportunities in green transformation and urban mobility optimization, and utilize digitization and big data reforms to advance the development of a sustainable transportation system.

The course of Business Environment and Economic Learning in Africa offered us a deep understanding of the non-negligible consumption potentials of new generations in Africa, the largest region with the fastest population growth in the next decades. Which part of Africa to choose as the pilot spot for going out is a key subject for Chinese enterprises that needs in-depth experience and thorough investigation.

Professor Marc Ventresca focused on research on trends in the field of space. Competitions in this field among countries are like a raging fire, but at the same time common challenges also exist: for example, how to solve the issue about space debris? At present each country has come up with some innovative technical solutions. In the process of space exploration, humans should cooperate with each other more, mutually sharing innovations to provide sustainable, reciprocal and win-win solutions for the sake of the objections and prospects of the entire human race in the future.

- Shuting Chen

We are honored to have the chance to attend class in Oxford University. The Global CEO Oxford Module this time has cultivated our global vision and forward-looking thinking method:

Professor Mungo Wilson has a core theory in class: theoretical revelation of uncertainty premium stratification model. The current core contradiction in investment is the opposition between “safety preference” and “risk demand”. In an era of multiple crises, the winning strategy should take both risk decomposition efficiency (like the reconstruction of Asian industrial chain) and uncertainty premium capture (like ex-ante option layout) into considerations, instead of purely avoiding risks. In the global order reconstruction period, investment strategies should transform from “predicting uncertainty” to “domesticating uncertainty”. Just as we were told at the beginning of the program, “designing a system that cannot be defeated is more important than making predictions precisely”.

The course of Imagination in the Age of Exponential Convergence given by Professor Lydia Kostopoulos can be summarized into three core case directions: 1. financial paradigm reconstruction of technological exponential transition; 2. imagination infrastructure for cross-domain integration; and 3. imaginative boundary breakthrough in institutional innovation. The course referred to AI ethics and asset pricing revolution, as well as the reconstruction of trust mechanism evolution empowered by blockchain. In the future we still need to enhance thinking training in classroom cases. The competitiveness in the age of exponential convergence depends on the imagination bandwidth that transforms technological mutation into institutional flexibility.

Professor Mark Dodgson illustrated the technical implementation path of nuclear fusion energy development, and introduced that the government and an increasing number of private enterprises have been investing tens of billions of dollars to develop nuclear fusion through international cooperation, inviting participants to work on the challenge of turning basic science into business application (especially in China) as well as innovations potentially emerging from the attempts. Nuclear fusion energy development has entered a new era, from the stage of pure scientific research to engineering verification and commercial exploration. The ultimate achievement will depend on the stereoscopic promotion of technological breakthroughs, capital allocation and policy coordination. Very impressive!

- Chengjing Sang