The Amos Tuck School of Business Administration will help Vietnam National University launch its Hanoi School of Business, the first business school in formerly-communist Vietnam.
This venture is the first alliance between a well-known American business school and a Vietnamese equivalent, said Tuck School Professor Paul Argenti, the program's academic director.
"We're the world's first business school, and they've got the first program in Vietnam, so it made a good marriage," Argenti said.
But the Tuck School does have previous experience with working to establish programs in foreign countries. Representatives from the Tuck School helped establish a Masters of Business Administration program at the International University of Japan.
Tuck School faculty and administrators said they are very excited about the new program.
"The opportunity is for our faculty to work in an emerging economy and to help their future business leaders as they emerge from a socialist system to a capitalist system," Tuck School Dean Paul Danos said.
"We want to help them get an introduction to Western-style systems and market economies," he said.
The program has three components. Several senior-level Vietnamese executives will first study business planning in Hanoi. They will then tour many U.S. corporations and will conclude their program with coursework at Dartmouth.
The idea for the alliance originated with Tuck School Professor Joseph Massey, the program's director and Director of the Tuck School's Center for Asia and the Emerging Economies.
In January 1994, Massey, former chief U.S. negotiator on trade with China, went to Vietnam to lecture on Vietnam, GATT and U.S. trade policy.
On that trip, he met Nguyen Thu Do, a Vietnamese official with a Harvard MBA. Having had a Western MBA education himself, Do had become an advocate in the Vietnamese government for bringing a Western-based, market economy to Vietnam, Massey said.
In December 1994, Massey came back with Argenti and three other Tuck School professors to present a series of seminars focused on the market economy.
"At this time, Mr. Do introduced us to the Hanoi School of Business team," Massey said. "As soon as we had the most prestigious university in Vietnam approach us for help in launching a business school, we said yes."
The project began with an executive training program, designed to "get management training to the most senior people in the country as quickly as possible," Argenti said.
The 12-and-a-half week executive program began on April 20 in Vietnam, when 30 senior Vietnamese executives began a series of short courses emphasizing major elements of a market economy.
After completing this phase of the program in early May, the executives will travel to the United States, where they will observe some of the institutions of a free-market economy, such as the World Bank in Washington, D.C. and the Boeing Company in Seattle, Danos said.
The executive program will conclude at the College with further course work on more global economic issues. The participants will then formulate and present a plan for a private business venture in Vietnam, Danos said.
"It's an exercise that pulls together all the elements of market-based economics," Danos said. "Everything you have to worry about in a capitalist country would be incorporated in this plan."
A larger-scale program to help the Hanoi School of Business develop an MBA-granting program will come later, Argenti said.
Argenti said prospects for faculty and student exchanges with the Hanoi School of Business are likely, but tentative at this point.
"We're hoping to get two faculty members from Hanoi here next year, and I would guess that we would have students going over there," he said. "There will be some sorts of exchanges, but right now it's sort of premature to talk definitively."
Funding for the program came primarily from the Freeman Foundation, which works to strengthen the bonds between the U.S. and Asian countries, and from corporate sponsors.
