Putting executive doctoral students front and center: driving transformative practices in China

Executive doctorates in management disciplines have witnessed strong and sustained growth in the number of graduates in the recent past, as opposed to traditional PhD programs, which have stagnated or decreased. As a result, there is a need to develop new curricula and learning models to teach these management executives and cultivate a practitioner-scholar mindset. To that end, we examine the application of several co-creative strategies to diagnose and reconfigure executive doctoral education. First, the study analyses current business models and educational practices of selected Euro-Chinese programs and shows how 12 constructs promote mentoring and coaching techniques appropriate for executive doctoral learners. The constructs direct a participative, learner-centered process. A second lesson includes developing an innovative delivery method by the local Chinese partner of international doctoral programs. The approach incorporates five components: a supervisor from an outside institution, Chinese academic mentors, a workshop on publishing for the Euro-China Research Network (ECR), a workshop on supervision, and student-led conferences. The final contribution uses case study research to show how the students lead and operate a knowledge-sharing project. The results show that the mentoring system's three novel components perform better than traditional approaches. The practice-oriented contribution emphasizes the change in responsibilities that management educators and researchers should consider while creating and promoting transformative educational experiences. This finding might alter how business schools conduct research and instruct about organizational phenomena – i.e., the knowledge creation and dissemination process. The theoretical contributions of this study include learning models for executive doctoral programs, appropriate curricula and pedagogy, and research-based insights on student engagement and learning.