Page 479 - 2020新世代·新需求：臺灣教育發展的挑戰研討會

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resource in global business operation and competition also become a buzzword
among Japanese policy-makers, industries and the public (Yonezawa, 2014). For

those Japanese-based multinational companies, these foreign students and skilled
workers are essential to maintain their commercial competitiveness across the
global. In order to have better world university rankings, Korea initiated World
Class University Project intending to attract top foreign professors, researchers so

as to enhance national and institutional competitiveness while Brain Korea 21 Plus
Project implemented in 2013 continued to augment the research capacity of South
Korean universities (Kim, 2016). With the vision of becoming ‘Boston of Asia’ and
the ‘Mecca for diplomas, degrees, and higher education’ (Ng, 2011), Singaporean

government purposely invited well-known world class universities to set up branch
campuses or joint degrees courses. Inbound foreign researchers, professors and
early career PhDs are the critical supporters of this growingly internationalized
academic environment and global competition.

These outlined initiatives in East Asia with respect to encouragement of
inbound talent are highly related to the movements of developing education
hubs in this region. According to Knight (2014), these new developments can
be categorized into different three types: student hub, talent hub and knowledge/

innovation hub respectively (p.15). These three notions are interconnected with
various focuses as student hub aims to provide educational services to foreign
students. On the other hand, talent hub is keen to create employment opportunities
for students and workers after they receive education and training. Finally, the

creation of knowledge/innovation hub intends to materialize a knowledge-
based economy through the production of knowledge and innovation by foreign
researchers, entrepreneurs and R & D centers etc. This extreme form of education
hub indicates that non-local talent is strategic and valuable asset in achieving better

economic growth or national development in general. Our policy analyses on

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