Building The Next Generation Of Innovators At HKU’s New I-School

The University of Hong Kong is one of Asia’s most distinguished research institutions—consistently ranked among the top thirty universities in the world and steeped in more than a century of academic tradition. In 2024, HKU launched a new School of Innovation , known as the I-School: a new academic unit built from the ground up to do something most large research universities only talk about. Its goal is to produce graduates who can work across disciplines, tackle problems that don’t yet have clear definitions, and bring ideas from prototype to reality.

Hong Kong’s Blueprint for Innovation

The motivation is rooted in a straightforward observation: the most consequential challenges facing Hong Kong, the Greater Bay Area, and the world do not sort themselves neatly into academic departments. Climate adaptation, public health, urban infrastructure, artificial intelligence—these are problems that demand integrative thinking and the ability to move fluidly between technical depth and human-centered design.

The founding vision drew on a growing international conversation about what engineering and innovation education should look like in the twenty-first century. Two American institutions loom large in that conversation. UC Berkeley’s emphasis on combining rigorous technical training with entrepreneurial practice has shaped a generation of Silicon Valley founders and intrapreneurs. And Olin College of Engineering—the small, project-driven school in Massachusetts that eliminated traditional departments entirely—demonstrated that it was possible to organize a curriculum around design challenges rather than disciplinary silos. Both informed the thinking behind the I-School, though HKU’s ambition was to adapt these ideas to a fundamentally different setting: a large, comprehensive Asian research university.

Many of the ideas behind the I-School draw from the Hong Kong Innovation and Technology Development Blueprint , a 2023 strategic plan from the Hong Kong Innovation, Technology and Industry Bureau. The Blueprint argues that “Innovation is the genes of growth of Hong Kong” and lays out a vision in which research and technology will spawn new industries, modernize traditional ones, and create high-quality employment across the region. Hong Kong sits at a remarkable nexus. With five universities ranked among the world’s top hundred, the city has the highest concentration of leading research institutions of any global metropolis. As part of the Shenzhen–Hong Kong–Guangzhou corridor, which includes Greater Bay Area’s 86 million people and roughly US$2 trillion regional GDP, Hong Kong is at the center of one of the world’s most active regions for science and technology innovation.

Leadership that Transcends Disciplinary Boundaries

To build the I-School program HKU appointed Hayden So, associate professor in the Faculty of Engineering, as Director. The role of co-Director was filled by Jason Woodward, a Senior Academic Partner at Olin College of Engineering, and former faculty member at Singapore Management University. So has long been an advocate for hands-on, project-driven STEM education and formerly served as co-director of HKU’s Computer Engineering program. He holds a doctorate in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from UC Berkeley and is an expert in reconfigurable computing at the boundary of hardware and software. Woodard received a PhD from Harvard University in a joint program between Harvard’s Schools of Business and Engineering and Applied Sciences and is an expert in complex product and system designs.

So traces his orientation back to his Berkeley years, and to a research style that always crossed disciplines. “I’ve been working with all sorts of wonderful people on different applications all through my research career,” he said. “Back in my Berkeley time, I was working with a bunch of radio astronomers, the people from SETI looking at the sky, building telescopes. At Hong Kong U, I work with people in ultrasound, cell imaging, 3D imaging, and then I work with people in aerodynamics. I’m the kind of person who likes working with different people across different domains.”

That habit of moving across boundaries shaped his sense of what was missing at HKU. “When I came to Hong Kong U, one thing that I noted right away is that I don’t see that kind of collaborations across faculties, even within the same department, next door.” Tackling societal challenges, he argued, “instantly, you will need to partner with people outside of engineering, outside of science. Within Hong Kong U, we have all these talents lying around, all excellent researchers. Just imagine the kind of impact we can make when we collaborate.”

Moving Engineering Education Out of Lecture Halls

Before the I-School, So had already pulled first-year engineering students out of their lecture halls. He developed an introductory course around designing a Rube Goldberg machine. “By definition, it should be silly and crazy, and I encouraged them to do that,” he said. The pedagogical aim, however, was rigorous: students had to integrate motor control, sensor circuits, and basic electronics into the contraption. “I heard more than once a student coming and saying, ‘Oh, that was the best course they have in the whole engineering curriculum after four years.”

Woodard places the I-School program inside an evolving regional dynamic. “Hong Kong has always had a distinctive position in the world as a gateway between East and West, and particularly as a gateway to China. You go 12 miles north across the border into Shenzhen, and it’s not only the world’s factory but one of the best places in the world to design and prototype hardware products.” The I-School, in his framing, is one part of an effort to integrate the Greater Bay Area—Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Dongguan—into a single innovation environment. “The term ecosystem,” he added, “is an apt one.”

Human-Centered Design at the Intersection of Disciplines

Woodard explained how this larger strategy shapes the school’s purpose. “Hong Kong has recognized for a while the necessity of shifting its economy in a way that really deepens the innovation and technology aspects. It’s not accidental that the program at the I-School is called the Bachelor of Science in Innovation and Technology.” Woodard’s work at Olin College of Engineering helped develop project-based, human-centered approaches to entrepreneurial engineering, and recently spent a sabbatical year working with the Shenzhen InnoX Academy and XbotPark.

Woodard describes how the new I-School sits within a triangle of traditional academic disciplines. “If you think about a triangle that’s got design, technology, and entrepreneurship at the corners—we want to be somewhere in the middle,” he said. “The Stanford d.school has really got the design thinking thing. Entrepreneurship, you tend to find more at business schools. And then technology, of course, you’ve got at more traditional engineering schools. One of the reasons Olin was used as a model for the School of Innovation is that Olin also lives at the intersection of those things.”

Together, So and Woodard represent the interdisciplinary ethos the school is designed to cultivate – neither purely technical nor purely strategic, but something more integrated than either. Their new program, Bachelor of Science in Innovation and Technology, or BSc(I&T) , enrolled its first class of about 40 students in September 2025. Project workshops form the backbone of the curriculum across all four years. Every semester, students develop interdisciplinary solutions to address a different real-world challenge, in the context of courses such as Physical Computing, Modelling the World, Sensing the World, and Forms and Materials. The curriculum signals the program’s refusal to observe conventional disciplinary boundaries while equipping students with the necessary technical foundation to innovate.

Innovation in Action with Real-World Challenges

The I-School describes its approach plainly on its website : “Innovation is a process that can only be mastered through practice.” Across four years of project experiences, students work with partners “from different walks of life to co-develop solutions that address their needs,” supported by foundational I-School courses, a self-designed technology focus, and a final capstone aimed at developing a solution to a substantial challenge.

So says: “Essentially, when compared to a traditional engineering program, I have completely flipped it upside down. Our students start building projects from day one without spending too much time on the basics. Then I let them go back to the disciplinary specific foundation like pursuing a minor in a traditional major. At the end, the major is now the innovation part. The minor will be the technology part.”

This structure differs from conventional engineering or entrepreneurship programs by moving away from solving well-defined disciplinary problems and toward more complex, ill-defined challenges, often with competing priorities and cultural dimensions. Assessment relies less on examinations and more on collaborative work, prototyping, and public demonstration.

Bringing Joy to Engineering Education

A signature event for the new program, a first-year course called Human-Centered Innovation, taught by Woodard and Faculty of Science colleague Rachel Lui, ended with a public showcase the team called “InnoJoy.”“In Olin’s first-year entrepreneurship course, we often run a one-day activity where we send students out, and their task is to create joy for people on campus,” Woodard explained. “At the I-School we made that into a full semester project. We said, hey, we’re having an event on November 20th—your task is to create joy for whoever’s walking through the lobby of this building at that particular time.” Students fanned out across HKU to interview people, and to wrestle with a deceptively simple question. “What is joy? Is it happiness? Is it excitement? Is it the lack of anxiety? Are people going to be stressed out and they need stress relief? Are they looking for something transcendent?” The answers, predictably, varied. “We had nine different projects, and they represented nine different ways to think about joy.”

The course experimented with assessment as well as content. It was graded pass-fail, an unusual choice in HKU’s tradition. “There was a fair bit of skepticism with this course about whether anybody would actually show up and do the work,” Woodard said. The result, he and So argue, suggests how strongly conventional grading shapes student behavior—not always for the better. “If you assume that everybody is responsive only to incentives,” Woodard said, “guess what? Our observation is they only respond to incentives.”

In its place, Woodard and Lui implemented what they call a multiplicative grading system. Students received a 0 or 1 across five basic dimensions—attending class, contributing to the team, and so on—and the grades were multiplied rather than added. “Zero times anything is zero, so if you don’t meet our basic expectations, you are not going to pass. But beyond that, we’re not actually interested in figuring out, did you do five percent more work than the other members of your team. We just want you to be there and engage. And it worked remarkably well.”

Fostering Innovation Across Hong Kong and Beyond

“The key is to plant the seed of innovation early in their study.” So summarizes the rationale of the program design. “Once they are motivated, they can and they will follow their passion into whatever areas their heart desires throughout their innovation journey. That’s how future innovators are going to be like - self-motivated, agile, and compassionate.”

The school envisions its graduates filling a particular niche in Hong Kong’s innovation ecosystem—as entrepreneurs and as “intrapreneurs” inside established firms. Future plans include a possible Master of Science in Innovation and Technology, deeper integration of artificial intelligence into the curriculum, and summer short courses in technopreneurship and social-impact innovation aimed at students from across the region.

As the I-School pioneers its new approach to engineering education, the model is likely to resonate well beyond Hong Kong. It demonstrates that integrative, project-driven, human-centered innovation education can thrive not only in boutique settings, but at the heart of one of the world’s leading research universities.

This article was originally published on Forbes.com