Welcome to the School of Entrepreneurship and Management (SEM) at the ShanghaiTech University!

In the 40 years since China’s “reform and opening-up”, the annual growth rate of the Chinese economy has averaged nearly 10 percent. This is no doubt a growth miracle. In recent years, however, China enters a period in which its economy is transformed from one led by exports and investment to a green and sustainable growth model that is based on the expansion of domestic demand and that relies on innovation and entrepreneurship. This transformation ushers in a new era of economic growth that is based on innovation and driven by entrepreneurship.

Founded in 2013 by the Shanghai Municipal Government in partnership with the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), ShanghaiTech is committed to becoming a research university of academic excellence and serving the national development strategy. The university aims to nurture future leading scientists, inventors and entrepreneurs. Students are encouraged to investigate the challenges China faces, to explore cutting-edge research areas and high-tech industries, and to put their innovative and entrepreneurial ideas into action.Located in Zhangjiang National Science Center, ShanghaiTech is surrounded by more than 600 R&D institutions, which provides a unique advantage for the university to be intimately connected to the cutting edges of the high-tech innovations.

SEM is established to meet the needs of China’s economic transformation, and to lead the new era of growth based on innovation and entrepreneurship. She is currently the only School of Entrepreneurship and Management in China. SEM is neither a traditional business school, nor a typical school of finance; she is a brand-new, forward-looking school that specializes in entrepreneurship and management. Our mission is to nurture the managerial talents to serve the real economy, and to launch top-notch innovators into successful entrepreneurs.

Transitioning from top innovators to successful entrepreneurs, and from research labs to boardrooms, requires a chain of knowledge in economics and management. SEM’s goal is to provide this chain of knowledge to our innovators, and to become the world's premier business school that is focused on nurturing innovation and entrepreneurship.

Currently, SEM mainly serves ShanghaiTech’s undergraduate and graduate students majoring in science and technology (including life sciences, material sciences and information sciences). SEM’s unique curriculum is aimed to develop the students’ technological expertise, to enlighten their innovative inspiration, to nurture their management capabilities, to stimulate their leadership potential, and to eventually forge entrepreneurial paths. SEM attempts to make creative design, innovation and entrepreneurship integral components of ShanghaiTech’s culture and DNA. In the future, SEM will also offer advanced training courses in entrepreneurship and management for researchers in R&D facilities and for small and medium businesses. We believe that these training courses will contribute to the transformation of the Chinese economy into a high-quality growth model mainly driven by innovation and entrepreneurship.

On research, we will adhere to the motto of “combining theory with empirical evidence” and the principle of dual excellence in research and teaching. We will build a new Research Data Center that will house a large collection of data sets, and we will engage in top-notch empirical research using the big data.

The Research Data Center will also be the backbone for a new think tank that specializes in theoretically-oriented empirical research based on big data. The think tank will strive to provide evidence-based strategic policy advice, both for Shanghai and China, in their transition to a high-quality economic growth model driven by innovation and entrepreneurship.

I am confident that we will become one of the world's premier entrepreneurship management school in the near future.

Jiye Mao

Academic Dean