At the noon of April 19, 2023, the Business School held the 1st Session of the Excellent Academic Forum Lecture Series in 2023 to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the establishment of the Business School and the MBA Education Center at the Conference Room A28 of the MBA Education Center. Professor Lin Song, dean of the Business School and director of the MBA Education Center, was invited as the keynote speaker of this forum, and more than 50 people (including teachers, master and doctoral students, and undergraduate students) attended this forum. Professor Liu Xiaoyuan, deputy dean of the Business School, presided over this forum.

    The topic of the lecture delivered by professor Lin Song is “How Cultural Diversity Affects the Performance of Semi-Virtual Teams”. The professor conducted an empirical research using the data from 4035 League of Legends games played by 102 cross-cultural teams from 2017 to 2020. The research results indicate that cultural diversity will improve the quality of a team’s strategy when the player identities of the team members become more prominent. This effect is more obvious when players need high-intensity contact with the game world, players are good at using many different virtual characters, and games are played at home. This result has been accepted for publication by Journal of International Business Studies, a top journal in the field of international business, which is one of the 24 internationally-recognized top economic management journals by UT/DALLAS, one of the 50 top academic journals for business schools in Financial Times, and also an AAA English journal for schools.

    After the sharing, the attending teachers and students actively participated in the discussion about the topic selection, research framework, theoretical contributions and research design of professor Lin Song’s lecture topic, further deepening their academic exchanges. Finally, professor Lin Song shared his experience in publishing papers in top journals with them, providing a reference for them to carry out high-level scientific research work.

    The “Excellent Academic Forum” is an academic exchange platform established by the Business School to fulfill the mission of “contributing new management knowledge”, which focuses on cutting-edge theoretical issues and organizational development dilemmas in the discipline of business administration and the Chinese enterprise management practice, and brings together frontier ideas and innovative ideas in China and abroad, so as to explore Chinese solutions for China's social and economic development.