EFEC hosted a party of six senior executives of the Phoenix Publishing and Media Group (PPMG), based in Nanjing, on a successful study trip to the UK and EU in early July.
PPMG is ranked amongst the top publishers in China and has been in the top 30 ranked cultural companies in China over each of the last 15 years. It is the second largest publisher of primary and secondary textbooks.
Its range of business includes publishing, distribution, printing, film and TV, cultural real estate, and trade, with an overall turnover in excess of £1.8bn. and 190 subsidiaries, most of which are SMEs.
Their visit included meetings in Cambridge, Oxford and London, before this week’s visits in The Netherlands to the University of Groningen (UoG) and the Jheronimus Academy of Data Sciences (JADS).
The Dutch visits were developed through EFEC partnerships in the Futures By Design (FBD) project.
In FBD, the EU-funded programme helped SMEs grow, innovate and increase productivity. UoG refined the concept and JADS made the tools. EFEC now leads the UK successor project.
The meeting at UoG was with the director of the exciting and relatively new University of Groningen Press (UoGP).
The UoGP focuses on open-access and online means to publish research and is growing both its market and range of publications very fast, embracing the new possibilities of online publishing.
At JADS, the story was told of how the University of Tilburg set up JADS as the interface with business, to help speed up digitisation.
This has resulted in many hundreds of businesses realising that using clean data properly can save considerable sums of money and/ or generate substantial new cash.
At both UoG and JADS, the colleagues from PPMG asked many penetrating questions and were able to form the basis for valuable future business links with The Netherlands. These included the possibilities for developing the online market and the measn to help subsidiaries to digitise with speed and impact.
As a result of all visits made and conversations had, EFEC and PPMG signed a Memorandum of Understanding. The MOU has a number of areas for co-operation:
a. Sin-British education think tanks
b. Vocational education training projects that integrate Chiens and UK best practices
c. International career planning and development projects
d. An international education and training demonstration base in the future
We can look forward to productive three-way collaboration EU, UK and China.