On the morning of April 17, Xie Jinhong, tenured professor of Warrington College of Business Administration, University of Florida visited the School of Management, HUST and gave a wonderful lecture to all teachers and students present in Room 206 of the School of Management. The topic of the lecture is “Identify Interesting Research Problems and Develop Novel Ideas”. The lecture was presided by Professor Jing Fengjie of the Business Administration Department (also as doctor tutor) and a large number of teachers from the School of Management and other universities in Wuhan attended the lecture.

　　At the beginning of the lecture, Professor Xie Jinhong first mentioned the sources of ordinary research ideas. She held that research ideas usually came from such aspects as practice observation, literature review and interaction between different disciplines. It is better to find research problems by practice observation than literature review. Then, how should we carry out observation? Xie Jinhong assumed that we should learn to observe different management strategies, new business models, unique market features and emerging markets in practices and come up with questions through observation. Moreover, she introduced her and her students’ papers and detailedly illustrated the whole process from observation to paper completion by analyzing these papers. In the following, she made a brief introduction to situation of research ideas coming from literature reviews and interdisciplinary research. In the end, she drew a conclusion of how to do innovative research, mainly including being passionate, curious, open-minded with unique knowledge structure and etc.

　　After the lecture, teachers and students present at the lecture were still immersed in the lecture. Though time was up, Xie Jinhong continued to talk about some relevant notes on writing papers and international editing and etc. All teachers and students present at the meeting gave warm applause to Xie Jinhong. Professor Tian Zhilong, director of Department of Business Administration gave Xie Jinhong a present and took pictures together.

　　Link: Professor Xie Jinhong serves as tenured professor of Marketing Department, Warrington College of Business Administration, University of Florida, chair professor of Etheridge International Business and distinguished professor and director of Marketing department, School of Economics and Management, Tsinghua University. In addition, she has taught MBA, EMBA and PhD courses in Carnegie Mellon University of America, University of Rochester, International University of Japan, Bocconi University of Italy, Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business in China and Tsinghua University. Professor Xie’s research involves in innovation of business models, network effects and standards competition, product innovation and competition strategies of hi-tech market, social interactions and marketing strategies in the age of Internet and etc. Her academic research has won many awards and honors in international marketing field and she has published tens of articles in international top academic journals. Professor Xie also served as deputy editor-in-chief of Management Science, chief editor in Marketing Science and editor of many international-standard journals in management and marketing such as Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Marketing, Information Systems Research, and Journal of Service Research.