Asia is planted firmly on the agendas of Europe’s business schools – as the subject of case studies and other course content, a destination for faculty research, the wellspring of partnerships and alliances and the location for programmes or even for a campus.

The flow of business school knowhow has tended to be one way, from Europe to Asia, in the dozens of partnerships and alliances European institutions have forged with Asian counterparts. But the exchange of content and talent is becoming a two-way process, as students and faculty move between the two continents.

It is still a rarity for European schools to set up their own campuses in Asia. This is not for want of demand from prospective students but more because of regulatory and political pressures that may make such a move impossible. Two European schools that have set up campuses in Asia, Essec and Insead, have both chosen the welcoming business environment of Singapore.

Paris-based Essec says its Essec Asian Center meets three significant short-term objectives: to raise the school’s profile and its scope of action on the international level; reinforce the understanding of Essec students of specifically Asian issues; and offer a centre for research and teaching to faculty wanting to widen their field of action and research.

Insead was early to recognise the importance of Asia, setting up its Euro-Asia Centre at its Fontainebleau campus, near Paris, in 1980. The centre has evolved since then, but in the mid-1990s the school realised it needed to move to the next level, says Soumitra Dutta, dean of external relations.

“Having a centre in France, and flying faculty back and forth to hotels in Asia to do programmes was not the way to develop a key capability in Asian business,” says Prof Dutta. “So we decided to set up our own campus in Asia.”

The school considered forming alliances, he says, but decided against it as it wanted truly to integrate Asia into its business. The decision to set up a campus in Singapore, which opened in 2000, coincided with the start of the Asian financial crisis, as Prof Dutta recalls: “A lot of people thought we were completely crazy going in when some people were getting out.”

But Insead has never looked back. Prof Dutta believes that, to be credible in Asia, the school needed to be locally relevant. “We needed faculty members who lived there, who learned from Asian companies and learned with Asian organisations,” he says.

The knock-on effects include courses with much stronger Asian influence, bringing in more Asian case studies and the fruits of local research. In executive education, Insead runs an increasing number of programmes not only for Asian corporate clients but also for traditional US and European clients that want at least part of the programme to be held in Asia.

The two Insead campuses are completely integrated, and students can join either or move between them. Overall, the proportion of Asian students on the school’s MBA programmes has surged from 5-6 per cent 10 years ago to 28-30 per cent now, says Prof Dutta.

For European or other foreign schools that have taken a particular interest in China, until recently there has been little or no scope for setting up their own campus, so other approaches have been necessary. An innovative approach by Lancaster University Management School has involved co-ordinating initiatives and programmes through a China centre on its campus in north-western England, and using this as a springboard for a deeper relationship with Chinese organisations, government departments, universities and students.

The Lancaster China Management Centre was founded in 2001, and was intended to create a “common portal” for research activity that had been going on in separate departments since 1984, says David Brown, its director. “It has been remarkably successful, and punches above its weight,” he says.

Bringing China-related activity together sends an important message to the Chinese at two levels, he says. “For students, it says that the institution they are thinking of coming to takes their part of the world seriously. For universities, our research agenda is collaborative, so it raises our profile.”

The centre has had a growing influence on course content and related activities. Regular China seminars are held, aimed mainly at postgraduate students, while research by individual faculty, conducted in China, can be brought back into the classroom, says Prof Brown. His own research on Chinese policy on IT and communications for small companies is a good example.

“It’s very powerful, especially when the students come from many nationalities, to be able to use contemporary issues in China to ground the research,” says Prof Brown.

Lancaster is now trying to raise money for a China- related chair that would allow every graduate student at the university to have a China unit as part of their course, if they wish. This in-depth approach would be one way to increase the distinctiveness of the Lancaster experience, says Prof Brown.

The classic way into China for European business schools is to form strategic alliances or partnerships. Prof Brown says the Lancaster approach is probably untypical as it concentrates on a small number of deep relationships with local institutions.

Elsewhere, some thriving partnerships have developed out of long-standing personal and academic connections. In 1984 when the China-EC Management Institute was established in Beijing, Pedro Nueno was vice-president of the European Foundation for Management Development, then the European partner in the venture.

The school moved to Shanghai and became the China Europe International Business School in 1994. Prof Nueno, who has been at Iese, the Spanish business school, since the late 1960s, has maintained his interest in Ceibs and is now its executive president.

Another Iese professor, Alfredo Pastor, holds the Spain chair at Ceibs and was dean of the Shanghai school from 2001 to 2004. During that time he signed a number of agreements with the Spanish school, covering areas such as student and faculty exchange or for bringing Ceibs staff to Iese to learn about issues such as dealing with alumni and admissions.

“So far fertilisation has been mostly in one direction – westerners are not very good at listening,” says Prof Pastor. He points out that Ceibs’s mission is to train Chinese managers in western techniques, explaining why the flow of information has been mainly one-way.

But things are changing, he says: in Shanghai students are asking for more and more references to the Chinese economy, rather than material based on the US economy. At Iese, says Prof Pastor: “We are teaching more and more about China. So [cross-fertilisation] has extended to content, but not really to methods.”

MBA students at Iese get the chance to go to Ceibs on exchange during the one semester that can be spent abroad, while faculty visit regularly for teaching and research – Prof Pastor now goes twice a year for trips lasting three weeks. In 2004 he was awarded Spain’s Great Cross of the Order to the Civil Merit for his contribution to improving Spanish-Chinese relations.

Not all European business schools feel the need to work in partnership with local institutions when they initiate their China-related activities. In 2003 France’s EM Lyon, for example, began its China-Europe Advanced Management Programme alone, focusing on improving leadership skills for multinational companies operating in China.

Yves-Henri Robillard, EM Lyon’s director for China, says the school has run the programme itself because: “We have the facilities on both sides [Europe and China] and we have identified relevant professors/consultants on both sides”.

However, the school’s strategy for China is based at the same time on developing local partnerships, which it believes is a key factor for success. Having established academic links in the country and gained the trust of local authorities, it wants to localise the programme as much as possible.

One issue has been finding a high-level, English-speaking professor in a local university with enough experience of training demanding executives from foreign companies. But Mr Robillard says that, through the strong relationship that has developed with East China Normal University, it is expected that an academic with the right qualities will be found within the Shanghai institution for the 2008 EM Lyon programme.

The programme was originally run for 15 days at the school’s French campus. But over time, both content and format have changed, says Mr Robillard, and there is now one five-day module in Lyon and two three-day modules in Shanghai.

Apart from the need to manage their partnerships to ensure they are useful, one issue for European business schools seeking alliances in China is that Chinese institutions are officially encouraged – or even directed – to form them, so may have dozens of such arrangements. Inevitably not all of them will receive the school’s full attention.

Nor will all joint programmes between Chinese and European schools flourish, as the courses can be expensive for Chinese students and put heavy travel demands on European faculty.

Although China is receiving considerable attention from European business schools, other markets are not being ignored. Lancaster, for example, is thinking about how it can develop an understanding of India in the same way as it has for China.

At Insead, Indian passport holders account for more than a third of all MBA applications, says Prof Dutta, and Indians are already the biggest nationality group in the school’s MBA programmes.

Interest is so strong from India that the French school has to limit its intake to 10-12 per cent of the total MBA cohort to ensure that it does not have too many from one nationality.