29 28 HKU ANNUAL REPORT 2023 ADDING VALUE HKU is supporting the drive for innovation across Hong Kong and the Greater Bay Area not only through our research, but our education of future researchers and entrepreneurs. At the undergraduate level, 29 courses across six faculties offered training in entrepreneurial skills in 2022–23. This complements the efforts by iDendron and the Start-up Connector programmes to support student entrepreneurial ventures (see page 24). Innovation is also emphasised in both research and taught postgraduate programmes. The Research Postgraduate Student Innovation Award launched in 2022 incentivises students to think outside the box, challenge existing paradigms and break new ground. Up to 10 awards of HK$50,000 each are handed out each year. The HKU Foundation Publication Award, established in 2022–23, encourages research postgraduate students to get their research published in leading journals. Twenty awardees are honoured each year and receive a HK$5,000 award. Meanwhile, the new Greater Bay Area MBA, launched in 2022, taps into the eager demand in the region for business professionals who can help take innovation to market and manage new companies. The part-time programme is targeted at experienced management professionals and admitted 163 students in its first intake in 2022–23 and 244 in the 2023–24 intake. Classes are held at both the HKU Business School’s Hong Kong campus and at its Shenzhen campus, which officially opened in 2022. The HKU MBA offered in Hong Kong was ranked No.1 in Hong Kong and 19th in the world by the composite Poets&Quants International MBA Ranking 2022–23 (based on rankings by The Financial Times, The Economist, Bloomberg Businessweek, and Forbes). BBiomedSc launched a capstone project for final-year students that takes them through the process of setting up a biotechnology start-up, including the problems and scenarios they may encounter, the business and marketing knowledge they may need, and how to apply their biomedical know-how. In 2023, Charmaine Tse worked on a project in her final year to develop a sensor for children with special educational needs that can help parents better understand their children’s emotions and improve classroom management to prevent outbursts at school. “This course allowed me the opportunity to step out of my comfort zone and pitch and present each lesson. I now have skills and an entrepreneurship mindset, which has inspired me to work on developing a pickup app for surplus food with my friends.” Research postgraduate students are being encouraged to develop applications based on their investigations through the new Research Postgraduate Student Innovation Awards. Two standout recipients were PhD candidate in Pharmacology and Pharmacy, Howard Chan Ho Wan, and PhD candidate in Urban Planning and Design, Li Maosu. Howard has developed a continuous manufacturing platform to fabricate inhalable nano-agglomerate powder formulations that offer efficient and optimal delivery of drug-loaded nanoparticles to the lungs, to tackle respiratory diseases such as lung cancer and COVID-19. And Maosu has developed the world’s first automatic machine learning-based city information modelling approach to estimate human-perceived openness of urban-scale window views, that can aid in building design and urban planning and overcome the oversimplification and limited scale of current assessments. BIOTECH START-UP TRAINING INNOVATION AWARD WINNERS Recipients of the Research Postgraduate Student Innovation Award 2022–23. Class photo of the capstone project taken with teachers Dr Masayo Kotaka (first from right) and Mr Jeffrey Broer (first from left). Howard at the Controlled Release Society 2022 Annual Meeting and Expo. Maosu (centre) receiving the Best Paper Award at the Global Smart Cities Summit cum The 3rd International Conference on Urban Informatics. 29 COURSES ACROSS SIX FACULTIES OFFERED TRAINING IN ENTREPRENEURIAL SKILLS IN 2022–23 INNOVATION PATHWAYS
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