In 1998, MIT Sloan and Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore signed a five-year agreement to offer mid-career executives working in Singapore opportunities in management education and research. MIT Sloan faculty taught courses at NTU, NTU faculty enrolled in MIT Sloan programs, and the two schools held joint conferences and symposia. MIT Sloan helped NTU establish its business school and a twelve-month Nanyang Fellows Program that offers immersion in Asia and exposure to the West.
Today, the formal MIT Sloan-NTU agreement has expired, but the relationship endures. In March 2010 NTU sent the Nanyang Fellows—approximately 20 men and women selected for their leadership potential in primarily ASEAN countries (e.g., Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, Malaysia, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Turkey, and Vietnam)—to spend three weeks at MIT Sloan for a program focused on sustainability.
An exciting outgrowth of the MIT Sloan-NTU collaboration is the Singapore-MIT Alliance, a collaboration of MIT, NTU, and the National University of Singapore that promotes engineering education and research at a global level. Using distance-learning technologies, the Singapore-MIT Alliance spans twelve time zones with classes delivered by faculty at all three institutions. Members of the MIT Sloan faculty work with faculty at MIT’s School of Engineering (which administers the alliance) to deliver multi-faceted knowledge that recognizes the crucial link between effective management and effective technology in the 21st century.