Professor Junsong Chen: five years of the entrepreneurial journey in Business Syntegrative Education

On the ground floor of Building E at XJTLU Entrepreneur College (Taicang), a carefully crafted culture wall stands. Every detail from the logo design to the spacing of the bricks was personally adjusted by Professor Junsong Chen. Beside it is the School of Intelligent Finance and Business (IFB) mascot, the “IFB Leopard”, which was selected from a School-wide creative competition he organised.

Staff, students, and visitors passing by often stop here, either to take photos or to look closely at the lively little leopard. Few people know what the School looked like when it was just starting five years ago.

In June 2021, Professor Chen joined XJTLU as the founding Dean of IFB.

Professor Junsong Chen

Nearly two decades in business education

Before coming to XJTLU, Professor Chen had worked across different types of business schools. He received a PhD in Marketing from Birmingham University. After returning to China, he spent over a decade working at CEIBS. During this period, he worked closely with corporate executives and entrepreneurs, listening to their real-world management challenges, and observing what they truly needed from talent.

Nearly two decades of teaching and management experience in business schools laid a solid foundation that gave him confidence when he came to XJTLU Entrepreneur College (Taicang). He knew the bottlenecks in traditional business education,  as well as the pain points in companies’ talent demands.

Starting from zero

In September 2022, XJTLU Entrepreneur College (Taicang) officially opened, and all staff and students moved from their temporary location on the Suzhou Industrial Park (SIP) campus to Taicang.

International Business School Suzhou (IBSS) was no longer able to continue providing teaching support, so all teaching and operations had to be handled independently by IFB’s own team.

Professor Chen recalls that not a single teacher at the School declined a task by saying, “This is not my academic specialism”. When new courses came along, teachers learnt as they taught. The School’s distinctive culture of sharing and collaboration quietly took root during those difficult days.

“When resources were limited, we did things ourselves. When there were no suitable promotional materials, colleagues built supply chain sand tables by hand and designed supply chain simulation games. When company visits became impossible during the pandemic, our business development colleague went to partner companies alone and created cloud-based classes through livestreaming,” Professor Chen recalls.

It was through these daily efforts by everyone in the School, regardless of job boundaries, that the School’s undergraduate programme, BSc Intelligent Supply Chain with Contemporary Entrepreneurialism, became increasingly popular among XJTLU students.

IFB staff and students visited the Schaeffler Group in 2023

A new programme, and a presentation that had to be delivered in person

As the programme began to settle into place, Professor Chen realised that the School could not rely on just one undergraduate programme. He decided to apply for a master’s programme.

The undergraduate programme was focused on supply chain management, but IBSS already had a master’s programme in Operations and Supply Chain Management.

How could IFB highlight the characteristics of new business education and the demands of the times? After multiple rounds of research with Programme Director Dr Qiong Ji , Professor Chen identified a field still rare in China: a master’s programme in digital business.

The programme’s application process took two years and formally began in 2022. The first hurdle was the University’s internal programme review presentation. At the time, pandemic controls were still in place, and some school heads chose to deliver their presentations online. Professor Chen, however, was determined to present in person at the SIP campus.

“The presentation was only 20 minutes long, but it carried the weight of the School’s development plan for the next several years. The stakes were too high for anything to go wrong. So no matter how difficult it was, I had to present on site,” Professor Chen says.

To comply with pandemic controls on cross-district travel, he stayed alone in his Taicang dormitory for two weeks without returning to his home in Shanghai. His on-site presentation won recognition from the review experts, and the programme later passed the approval processes of both the University of Liverpool and China’s Ministry of Education.

Professor Junsong Chen delivering his Dean’s speech

However, by the time the MSc Digital Business programme was officially approved in May 2024, there was barely over one month left for recruitment.

“To be honest, my expectation was not very high at that time. I would have been satisfied if we could recruit 30 students in the first cohort,” Professor Chen says. “I didn’t expect the market response to be so strong. We received more than 200 applications and eventually admitted 60 students after selection.”

This year, the number of admitted students exceeded 120.

IFB Homecoming Party in 2025

Cultivating business talent who unite knowledge and action through practice

At XJTLU Entrepreneur College (Taicang), the education model implemented is XJTLU 2.0 Syntegrative Education, proposed by Executive President Professor Youmin Xi.

In 2023, the School partnered with Citi to host the 19th Citi Cup Financial Innovation Application Competition

To broaden students’ industry horizons, the School has built a long-term and diverse platform for University-industry collaborative education. Today, the School works closely with more than 50 well-known Chinese and international companies, including Bosch, SAP, Schaeffler Group, JD.com, and Li Auto. Drawing on the exceptional industry resources in Taicang, it has also developed distinctive enterprise-based classes, bringing teaching to the front line of business operations.

In 2025, staff and students from the School attended the 8th Asia-Pacific Smart Supply Chain and Logistics Innovation Convention

“Most of the courses in our School have already cancelled written exams,” Professor Chen says. “Companies do not need students who are simply good at taking tests. They need people who can solve problems. We break down the work scenarios students will face in the future and turn them into simulated projects in the classroom.”

In 2024, the School and Bosch jointly held the “Bosch-IFB Industry Day”

In 2023, IFB began implementing the IFB-Hub initiative. “Many people of our generation have a sense of romance about martial arts stories. In Shaolin Temple, the Sutra Pavilion is a sacred place where martial arts manuals are stored. In my mind, the IFB-Hub is the School’s own ‘industry Sutra Pavilion’. It is designed to collect business challenges from industry and solve them,” Professor Chen says.

Each semester, the School launches eight to ten IFB-Hub projects, all drawn from real operational challenges faced by partner companies. Under the guidance of School teachers and enterprise mentors, students complete the projects and ultimately produce implementable solutions.

In a warehouse efficiency improvement project for Bosch’s Kunshan office, for example, the student solution saved the company nearly 500,000 RMB in annual operating costs.

In a project on relocation planning for the tooling centre of Mubea Automotive Components, the team optimised the layout plan, increasing plant space utilisation by 20%, shortening employees’ movement routes by 30%, and saving more than 100,000 RMB per month. There are many stories like these.

In 2023, a student team conducted on-site project research at the Bosch Kunshan warehouse

The greatest value of the IFB-Hub projects lies not only in the solutions students deliver, but also in their growth throughout the process. Students come to truly understand what real business needs are, what data-driven decision-making means, and how to handle matters with the right perspective and judgement.

People at the core: kindred spirits forging a new path in education

For five years, Professor Chen has travelled the expressway from Shanghai to Suzhou.

“Every week, when I leave my home in Shanghai and head to the School, I always feel a sense of joy and anticipation for this pioneering venture in education. I am very grateful that XJTLU has provided such an outstanding platform, bringing together a group of like-minded colleagues to explore new business education in China. That sense of achievement is also the reason why I joined XJTLU in the first place,” Professor Chen says.

IFB academic staff

By Jiayan Ji

Translated by Xiangyin Han

Edited by Patricia Pieterse

Photos courtesy of Professor Junsong Chen