The DBA, or doctor of business administration, has been gaining in popularity over the past decade, particularly in Asia-Pacific, according to Professor Matthew Lee, director of the DBA programme at City University (CityU).
One reason, he says, is status. Chief executive officers and the corporate high-flyers are looking beyond the now ubiquitous MBA to sharpen their minds and distinguish their skills.
But for Lee and academics like him, and for the growing roster of DBA alumni, the degree's key success factor is that it has established a position at the confluence between two previously divergent streams of thought: the disciplines and abstractions of academic research, and the profit-driven imperatives of applied business management.
'There are a lot of senior executives today who already have their MBA, but want to take their learning further. Prior to the DBA, they would have had to do either another masters, which is primarily instructional coursework, or a PhD, which is all academic research. The DBA focuses on research, but it must have practical applications in business management.'
CityU's DBA students are primarily CEOs with an average 15-20 years' experience. Some 80 per cent work for multinationals, the remaining 20 per cent for regional or local listed companies, including those on the mainland, where CityU has just established an exclusive tie-up with Shanghai's Fudan University.
All the students have MBAs. Some already have second master's degrees. Typically, they have already accomplished a lot professionally. Their companies are running well on a day-to-day basis. Now they want to take a step back from operations and focus on long-term strategies. On the grounds that all CityU DBA students already know how to run a business, the coursework focuses on introducing them to the tools of the academic trade instead.
'We need to teach them the theories, principles and methodologies of analytical research,' Lee says. 'It is a different world from the one they are used to, and without the ability to fuse academic skills with their own experience and methods, they will almost certainly fail.'
