Q. What new programs are you going to introduce at the school of business?

A. We're going to launch our new executive MBA program this fall. When the students come in and I take the roll, (I tell them), "You will be a consultant to your company. Upon completion of the program in 18 months, you will bring in your CEO for your final presentation. You will tell the CEO what changes you are going to recommend and then you are going to tell the CEO how to bring about these changes in the organization." That is practical, applications-driven, hands-on so that from day one in that course every teacher will be linked into those particular situations so that 18 months later when the students come in, that's what they're going to do. They will be given the tools so that in their company they can bring about change. They will be assigned to be a consultant for their company.

Q. How important is entrepreneurial spirit?

A. We are going to open an Entrepreneurship Center. It will be downtown, attached to Hawai'i Pacific University. I'm bringing in an ex-colleague of mine from The Chinese University of Hong Kong. It's got multi purposes. The economic growth in the United States is due to entrepreneurs. The United States leads the world in terms of percentage of entrepreneurs relative to the population. One of the things I want to do is to have people come study entrepreneurship here as part of our degree program. That's one objective is to teach young people how to start these things up and how to run them. It's going to be used to channel companies to faculty members who are in that particular specialization. It will open up doors for faculty members to do some research in certain areas and it will allow us to run short-term management training programs.

Q. What is the advantage of being in Hawai'i?

A. We're in a great location. I've got the best of all three worlds. I've got the Asian perspective. I've got the Hawaiian and the U.S. perspective and I've got a European perspective. What a great place for a Mainland U.S. company to come and test some products here before they jump into the minefield of Asia.

Q. As dean, do you have enough time to teach?

A. I love it. That's my first love so I will always have time. I'll teach that first course in the executive MBA program, which forces you to rip your company apart. I come from Hong Kong. I haven't had a weekend off in 28 years. You don't go home at 5 o'clock. You go home when you finish.

Q. Where do you see yourself in the next few years?

A. I see us moving forward on all of these strategic initiatives. I see us being a player in the community. I see us working with our linkages to our alumni overseas on a much more proactive basis. I see us continually recruiting around the world. I see the Entrepreneurship Center being a critical piece in what the governor has said about innovation. I see us playing a major role in moving that whole concept of innovation forward.

Q. What are the major challenges that you face?

A. The biggest challenge is putting the pieces together. In most all organizations, when you're a specialist, you're not stepping back and looking at the piece. It's up to me to hook everything together.

Q. Will you be adding to your staff?

A. We will go out and add faculty. We're going to expand. We will go out and get faculty members who want to come and play in this type of game. A lot of faculty members that I have seen go to other types of universities and say, "What will this university do for me?" I want faculty members who are coming in here saying, "What can I do for this town and for this university?" It's finding those types of people. The lady that I hired to be the director of our entrepreneurship center wrote me an e-mail today and it said, "I've hooked up with one of your alumni in Hong Kong. We will organize the alumni party on March 12 in Hong Kong." She doesn't even have the contract yet. There are people out there who have been in traditional academic institutions, where they are pressured to publish in obscure academic journals. Those aren't the people that I want to come here. I want people to do scholarly work, but not sit in their office thinking, "I've got to get something in the Journal of Marketing Research." I want people who can come here and say, "I want to help the organization. How can I help this place grow?"

Q. What is your message to the community?

A. The only thing I have is to say to parents and grandparents, I think the critical issue is what kind of education do you want your children to have out there? And to me the great advantage is that, especially with globalization upon us, here is an opportunity for Hawai'i students to really have their first experience at globalization, coming in and having to deal with students from 110 different countries. That's an experience you can't buy, unless you go fly overseas somewhere. But here you can have it right in Hawai'i. You get your first international experience. So that's the thing that I want to drive home to parents and grandparents, and say, "Look, here's a chance for your son, your grandson, your granddaughter to come to HPU and get that experience right off the bat."

Q. What brought you to Hawai'i Pacific University?

A. I went to a fraternity reunion from my old college days, and at that reunion I was approached by a fellow from Hawai'i who said, "Why don't you come to Hawai'i? Take a look at Hawai'i and see what we do good and bad and right and wrong." I said to him, "That's a very nice invitation, how do you plan to get me here?" He said, "I know what you've been doing in Hong Kong. Let me submit a recommendation to (HPU President) Chatt Wright about bringing you in to teach a course at HPU." Two weeks later I received an invitation from Chatt Wright and the dean of the business school to come and teach a course in the fall semester of 2003. ...The fall of '06 I came in and president Chatt Wright said, "Why don't you stay for a while?" So I agreed and I stayed.

Q. You went from a one-semester "break" in Hawai'i to a full-time position here. What made you stay?

A. The thing that has brought me back was I've been in the faculty of some very large universities around the world and I must say Hawai'i Pacific University is different because people come here to teach. These are teachers. This is their first love. I've never seen a place where teaching was really the priority. So I was happy to be surrounded by people who liked to teach. The second thing is where else could I go in the world where I would walk in and I give a particular case situation and I have two of the Greek students telling the Japanese students how they're going to launch their product in Japan, and the Japanese students telling them that it won't work, but how they're going to launch their product in France. The third thing is that this is a very comfortable environment for me. I'm not sure that I would go live on the Mainland after being in Asia for most of my adult life.

Reach Curtis Lum at culum@honoluluadvertiser.com.