April 6, 2025, Tampa, Florida, USA - The AACSB (Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business), the world's largest business education alliances, announced that our college's “To Alleviate Poverty in Rural Areas” program has won the 2025 AACSB “Innovations That Inspire” award. We became the fifth business school in China to receive this award, marking another international recognition of Chinese universities' exploration of integrating business education into rural revitalization strategies and promoting social value creation. Only 26 programs worldwide were the winners for the 2025 award. The AACSB judging panel highly praised the program for “injecting sustainable development momentum into the rural economy through systematic branding and innovative marketing, and demonstrating the global model of business education's deep insights into and solutions to social issues”.
Figure 1: Official website link https://www.aacsb.edu/
“This year's 'Inspired Innovation' winners exemplify the power of business and higher education to collaborate in driving positive change. By connecting with industry, the winning institutions demonstrate how business schools can foster innovation and ensure that their graduates make an immediate impact when they enter the workforce,” said Lily Bi, AACSB official CEO.
This year's award-winning programs highlight how business schools around the world are forging deep and innovative collaborations with corporations, NGOs, and government agencies to address societal challenges and promote the deeper integration of business education and social development. These innovative practices not only define the new boundaries of business education, but also provide a model path for the cultivation of future business leaders and the creation of social value. Since its inception in 2016, the award has become an important benchmark for measuring the innovative strength of business schools. 2025's selection is supported by the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, Parker, further highlighting the award's international recognition and academic authority.
Figure 2: Roadshow and site visit of the award-winning projects
The two courses have produced more than 20 innovative and practical rural brand revitalization plans, realizing the effective grafting of academic research wisdom and local resources, and constructing a new mode of rural revitalization talent training in which “classroom is the field”. In the “Branding and Marketing Strategy for Rural Relief Project”, our college faculty and students have innovatively constructed a practical model of industry-teaching integration. The project deeply integrates academic research and government poverty alleviation work, transforms the real challenges of rural economic development in Haifeng and Lufeng into vivid teaching cases, and implants them into the general course of “Branding Skills and Practices” and the professional core course of “Marketing Planning”, which effectively stimulate the students' potential for innovation and sense of social responsibility. In the specific implementation process, the two courses form a differentiated practice path: open to the whole school “branding skills and practices” public elective course attracted 36 students from 25 different majors, after three months of systematic learning and innovative practice, the birth of 8 sets of special branding programs. While the professional course “Marketing Planning” organized 32 marketing students to focus on the characteristics of Lufeng City agricultural resources, targeted development of “Peiyang Pineapple Plan” and other 8 special plans with commercial transformation value.
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Review of AACSB History of SZUCM
SZUCM formally joined AACSB membership in 2016, launched the application in February 2017, and was formally accredited by AACSB in July 2023, after passing several rounds of assessments, including Unit-EA, EA, initial self-evaluation (submission of iSER report), annual progress, and self-assessment (submission of SER report).
About AACSB
Founded in 1916, AACSB is an internationally recognized top-tier accreditation for business schools. Currently, less than 6% of the world's business schools have been accredited by AACSB, and the rigor of its accreditation standards is well known around the world.
