Singapore, 23 Mar 2012 (Friday) – SMU President Professor Arnoud De Meyer is among seven people who will, today, be conferred an honorary degree from Ghent University in Belgium this year. Professor De Meyer will be given an Honorary Doctorate for his scientific contributions.
Professor De Meyer's emphasis on information and knowledge as a production factor has been a common theme throughout his academic career. His strong interest in the flows of information in a Research and Development department took him to MIT, Sloan School of Management as a Visiting Fellow and he later returned to earn his doctorate at Ghent.
This interest in the management of R&D was quite rare in 1980s and also made Professor De Meyer one of the early contributors in specialised journals.
In a citation, Ghent University commented, “In the Nineties, Arnoud developed INSEAD's campus in Singapore and succeeded in turning it into one of the top three business schools worldwide. During this time, he also published a leading paper every year, making him a reference in the scientific field.
The year 2006 marked another big step forward in his career, with his appointment as Professor at the prestigious Cambridge University and as Dean of the Judge Business School. In 2010, much to everyone's surprise, Arnoud changed tack again. He left Judge to become the new President of the Singapore Management University, a university that is poised to compete with the leading American universities. Simultaneously he published one of his best scientific works about making decisions under uncertainty.”
Over the last 30 years, Professor De Meyer has taught about the implications of his research for business in many executive programmes. Thousands of executives from industrial companies and consultant organisations have attended his classes in strategic R&D Management, Manufacturing and Operations Strategy and Innovation Management at his former institutions INSEAD and Cambridge University.
Based on his pioneering experience with the internationalisation of INSEAD he wrote several influential articles and contributed significantly to a major project by the AACSB on the globalisation of academic institutions.
In his very recent work, Professor De Meyer is also exploring how science can be commercialised faster and is thus looking at the interface between universities and industry.
His work on global R&D Management made him an early observer of the fact that emerging Asia was a significant source of ideas for innovation and he was one of the first to publish on how to manage innovations in Asia. His work is still highly relevant today, in particular to innovation out of emerging markets including China and India.
In Singapore, Professor De Meyer is a board member of National Research Foundation and Singapore International Chamber of Commerce. He had also served on the Singapore Economic Review Committee and as a board member of the Infocomm Development Authority.
In addition, he was and is appointed a member of several boards including Dassault Systemes S.A. in France, Option N.V. in Belgium because of his deep understanding of the innovation process, and he has consulted with a wide range of companies, in particular in the telecommunication and automotive sector.
Founded in 1817, Ghent started as a Latin-speaking State University by William I, King of the Netherlands. In 1930 Ghent University became the first Dutch-speaking University in Belgium.
Located in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium and the cultural and economical heart of Europe, Ghent University is an active partner in national and international educational, scientific and industrial cooperation.
Over the years eminent scientists such as Joseph Plateau (physicist, considered as a pioneer in the development of motion pictures), Leo Baekeland (inventor of Bakelite) and Corneel Heymans (Nobel Prize winner in Medicine) studied and worked at Ghent University.
Because it plays a leading role in the academic and scientific world, Ghent University attaches great interest to a transparent organisation structure, a dynamic human resources policy, an active environmental policy, its support to spin-offs and other new initiatives.
Previous Ghent honorary degree recipients include US Presidents Wilson Woodrow and Herbert Hoover; French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau; Bakelite inventor Leo Baekland, Nobel laureates Erwin Schr?dinger and Kofi Anan; James William Fulbright (whose name has been given to the Fulbright Programme) and naturalist and broadcaster David Attenborough.
The honorary doctorate will be conferred on Professor Arnoud De Meyer on 23 March 2012, during the Dies Natalis festivities, which also marks the 195 th anniversary of Ghent University.
The other six honorary doctorates will be awarded to Masatoshi Takeichi , director of the Riken Center for Developmental Biology and director of the Laboratory for Cell Adhesion and Tissue Patterning; Désirée van der Heijden , senior researcher at the Diakonhjemmet Hospital in Oslo and affiliated with Leiden University Medical Center, Osamu Motojima , director-general of ITER International Organisation, Paul R. Sackett , research at the University of Minnesota and world authority on assessment and psychological testing, Saskia Sassen , Robert S. Lynd Chair occupant and visiting professor at the London School of Economics as well as Paula Sémer , who used to be a televison broadcaster during the pioneering years of Belgian television. Through her educational programmes she brought science into the homes of the regular audiences.