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Innovations That Inspire

V-Bridge to Co-create Future Business Education

Recognition Year(s): 2025
School: School of Economics and Management, Beijing Jiaotong University
Location: China

The V-Bridge program fosters open collaboration between business schools and enterprises, which creates a dynamic and sustainable system that accelerates digital transformation and mutual growth. Business scenarios are visually replicated to allow both companies and students to interact and experiment in a controlled environment. Quickly adapting to evolving challenges, students and enterprises can continuously update solutions through the program’s agile structure.

Call to Action

Three areas of opportunity encouraged the Beijing Jiaotong University (BJTU) School of Economics and Management (SEM) to create this platform. First, the school recognized a disconnect between theoretical education and the practical needs of enterprises. Often, companies struggle to find talent capable of addressing emerging market demands through conventional education systems. The V-Bridge program addresses this issue by providing virtual simulation environments. There, students can engage in experimentation that directly aligns with the evolving needs of businesses.

Second, in today’s rapidly changing digital market landscape, businesses require talent skilled in managing complex business operations and collaboration between humans and artificial intelligence (AI). Traditional education can fall short in equipping students with these critical abilities. In response to this need, BJTU empowers students to deepen their understanding of future technologies and business operations through interaction with AI.

This knowledge gap in digital transformation prompted the school to create a platform that mirrors real-world corporate operations and AI applications. Through it, students gain direct hands-on experience and learn to design AI-enabled business scenarios and transformation strategies.

And finally, enterprises face significant risks when conducting digital innovation in real-world settings. What they often lack is a controlled and low-risk environment for strategic validation. SEM’s program and platforms offer an opportunity for companies to explore their innovation designs in a relatively safe environment, thus gaining valuable insights and developing strategies for their own digital transformation and operational optimization.

Innovation Description

By simulating entire business operations, the platform creates cross-departmental collaborative scenarios. It replicates complex business processes, allowing enterprises to test and optimize various decision-making paths.

This deep integration of technology and organizational management provides a controlled environment through which enterprises and students can fully explore human-AI collaboration. The platform empowers enterprises to refine their strategies while offering students a real-world context for knowledge production and learning.

The platform offers a series of business operations with human-AI collaborative experiments. These domain-specific experiments foster cross-disciplinary knowledge integration, which turns real business challenges into visible and operable tasks. Enterprises actively test their strategic decisions in complex environments while also identifying and nurturing talent capable of solving real-world problems.

This experiment-driven approach enhances academic learning by tightly linking theory to practice. By centering practical action-learning models, the platform promotes deep interaction between enterprises and academia. It facilitates joint innovation through activities such as university-enterprise competitions and enterprise-driven practice projects.

Enterprises use data collected from students’ experimental behaviors to guide their own operational innovations, creating a feedback loop that supports continuous business optimization and digital transformation. This collaborative ecosystem accelerates mutual growth and long-term strategic alignment.

Innovation Impact

The program has successfully established partnerships with key industry players, including five transportation companies, six smart manufacturing firms, two research institutions, eight emerging technology enterprises, and four smart education enterprises. By providing a low-risk environment for digital innovation, the platform enables enterprises to refine business strategies, optimize operations, and foster continuous innovation.

At the time of writing, 72 universities have registered 1,791 students to the platform, including 777 students from 10 universities or enterprises that participated in the Smart Business Cup AI Teammates Innovation Competition. The platform has hosted a total of 9,714 virtual simulation experiments. This growing academic involvement enriches the platform’s knowledge base and strengthens the link between theoretical education and practical industry needs.

Leveraging the virtual simulation platform and university-driven methodologies, SEM has successfully conducted corporate training and hosted the AI Teammates Design Innovation Competition. This collaboration has led to digital innovation rooted in real business scenarios.

These initiatives have already secured three software copyrights, obtained one utility patent, and facilitated the approval of five enterprise projects. Looking ahead, the school plans to build a sustainable ecosystem that continuously fosters innovation and real-world application.

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