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Edited and published by Fumio Itoh, Ph.D., President, ABEST21

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­·and research activities. The School nonetheless recognizes the need to find a mechanism to retainexcellent professional staff for longer than three years while simultaneously identifying andimplementing professional development options for staff.
The School has implemented formal mechanisms to vitalize its curricula via promotion of educationaland research activities of the faculty. Specific mechanisms are provided in the SCR. To providesystemized and clear direction, the School intends to have performance agreements which identifyspecific initiatives (conferences, training courses, seminars, forums, etc.) aimed at enabling a facultymember to keep up to date with the latest developments, research and practice in their field, as wellas to present their own research, case writings, books and other intellectual contributions, and tonetwork with their international counterparts.
Currently, the School does not set an official research period for its faculty other than sabbaticalleave. However, the School is considering providing official research period for its faculty. The Schoolhas in place a documented process/ system for seminar faculty to take sabbaticals. On this score, theSchool expresses intention to put in place more flexible systems that support sustainability ofsuitable levels of educational program and operational performance during the temporary absenceof a faculty member, so facilitating a culture more conducive to faculty taking a sabbatical.
In terms of reward system for excellent academic research of its faculty, a research fund has beencreated to encourage and reward high quality PRJ contributions. The School is working on settingbenchmarks and revising the system where necessary towards establishing promotion-linkedintellectual contribution (IC) requirements to recognize and reward equally all types of research.
Whenever possible the School utilizes the excellent academic research of its faculty in the educationprocess. Case in point is the use of the School's Professor Emeritus Ikujiro Nonaka's pioneering workthat led to the creation of the new academic field of Knowledge Management (KM) in the school'sprogram. The School intends to raise awareness among faculty of the full range of the School'sfaculty members' intellectual contributions and where practicable, prioritize inclusion of these incourse materials.
The School has a system for examining work responsibilities on an annual basis. If there is animbalance, redistribution of the workload is discussed. However, there is no upper limit on thenumber of courses or credits that the faculty can teach. This issue needs to be addressed.
Overall, the maintenance of education and research environment is appropriate, and excellentacademic research results and faculty contributions (including cases) are integrated in theeducational process. However, the issue of the faculty workload needs to be addressed, since thefaculty members perform both teaching and administrative duties. Criterion 22-1 requires that thenumber of courses that the faculty members teach is limited so that they have time to develop theireducational and research activities.
Thus the standard is partially met. Maintenance of education and research environment through asystemized mechanism is an area where the School needs to focus further.
Standard 23: Responsibilities of Faculty Members[PRT Comments]At the School, faculty members regularly and systematically develop, update and improve theircourse content, materials and teaching methods based on the results of self-review and evaluationas well as those of students and their colleagues. To further improve, the School is planning to makemore explicit, formal linkage between course and faculty evaluation and continuous improvement byspecifying course learning outcome goals/targets in faculty performance agreements.
The School's faculty members utilize their diverse backgrounds and experience to deliver world-class,41