Professor Hongbin Cai, Dean of HKU Business School and Chair of Economics, framed the launch as the continuation of a strategy that began nearly a decade ago. In his welcome remarks, he noted that the school has been nurturing future wealth management professionals since 2017, and that wealth management has become increasingly important in economic development as Hong Kong leverages its unique position connecting the Chinese Mainland with the rest of the world. He added that the sector will be of even greater significance in Hong Kong’s upcoming Five-Year Plan, signalling that the government’s own planning documents are expected to elevate the industry’s role in the city’s economic future.

The dean was candid about the environment in which the Academy will operate. Hong Kong, he said, is navigating an era filled with uncertainties, shaped by rapid changes in the global landscape and the fast-paced evolution of artificial intelligence. His argument was that the city must respond to these challenges by continuously strengthening its overall competitiveness, and that the Academy is designed as part of that response. By providing an international platform that brings together government, industry, academia and research, the institution aims to act as a key driver of the wealth management ecosystem, contributing through three channels that the school identifies as thought leadership, talent development and industry engagement.

The timing of the launch was a central theme of the ceremony. Christopher Hui, Secretary for Financial Services and the Treasury, delivered the keynote address and told the audience that the Academy’s establishment comes at a pivotal moment as the industry enters a new chapter. He described the idea of connecting the dots as both a fitting ambition for the Academy and a timely one for Hong Kong’s current development needs. In his telling, the city having emerged as the world’s largest cross-boundary wealth management centre immediately raises a follow-up question: what kind of leadership does that top position actually represent? It is a framing that shifts the conversation from raw market size to the quality of the professional ecosystem that sustains it.

Hui also used the address to outline the policy work under way in government. He said continuous policy enhancements include refining the preferential tax regimes for funds, single family offices and carried interest, broadening the range of qualifying investments to cover private credit, digital assets and precious metals, and strengthening connectivity with Chinese Mainland markets. Notably, he argued that the growth of the wealth management sector should reach beyond the assets it manages, extending into skilled careers, investment in enterprises and support for communities. That wider definition of success matters for a university-led academy, because it positions education not merely as a pipeline for asset managers but as a contributor to the sector’s broader social and economic footprint.

The ceremony also featured a panel discussion under the theme of what comes next for Hong Kong after reaching number one. Three speakers took part: Joseph Chan, Under Secretary for Financial Services and the Treasury; Aveline San, Chief Executive Officer and Banking Head of Citi Hong Kong, Chair of Citibank (China) and Convenor of the Financial Services Development Council’s Human Capital Committee; and Lok Yim, Regional Head of HSBC Private Bank, Asia Pacific. The discussion was moderated by Professor Anna Wong, Director of the HKU Business School Wealth Management Academy, whose own appointment to lead the new institution reflects the school’s decision to place an academic at the centre of its industry-facing agenda.

Chan laid out three priorities for consolidating Hong Kong’s position as the leading international wealth management centre. The first is to proactively reach out to more jurisdictions to showcase the city’s unique advantages. The second is to continuously enhance policy in line with market development trends such as fintech and green finance so that competitiveness is maintained as the industry evolves. The third is to strengthen connections with the global financial sector and with different markets. Taken together, the three points sketch a strategy in which regulatory agility and international outreach reinforce each other, with Hong Kong competing on both product breadth and access rather than on any single advantage.

On the question of people, Chan offered a measured view of the sector’s most pressing constraint. He acknowledged that a talent shortage is a possible bottleneck for the industry, but argued that it also reflects the sector’s rapid growth rather than decline. Alongside government training initiatives, he said, the education sector can play a key role in helping young talent upskill and gain industry exposure through internship programmes that meet the sector’s evolving demands. That is precisely the territory the new Academy intends to occupy, and its programme of activities suggests a deliberately practical orientation rather than a purely academic one.

The Academy builds on an existing educational foundation. In 2017, HKU Business School launched the Bachelor of Finance in Asset Management and Private Banking, the first undergraduate programme of its kind in Asia, followed by the Master of Family Wealth Management and the Master of Wealth Management programmes. With the Academy now in place, the school’s activities, supported by Bank of China (Hong Kong), will include directing students toward internship opportunities, organising salons, forums and a wealth management challenge, and offering scholarship programmes. The institution also plans to facilitate engagement between students and industry professionals through talks and other activities designed to foster collaboration between industry and academia and to enable knowledge exchange. An advisory committee comprising industry representatives and scholars specialising in finance, investment and wealth management will advise on the development of the Academy’s programmes and its strategic direction.

For HKU Business School itself, the launch adds a specialised institution to a portfolio that has been climbing the research rankings. Established in 2001, the school is ranked number one in Asia and number six globally in the 2025 UTD Business School Research Rankings, and number one in Asia and number eleven globally in the 2026 Financial Times Research Ranking. It holds accreditation from both EQUIS and AACSB and operates an international network extending to Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Ho Chi Minh City. The significance of the new Academy, however, may lie less in rankings than in the model it represents: a formal, funded bridge between a government that is rewriting tax and investment rules, a financial industry that is short of skilled people, and a university that has been building wealth management curricula since 2017. If Hong Kong is to translate its newly won number-one status into durable leadership, the Academy’s founders are betting that the decisive variable will be talent, and that the university is the place to produce it.

Subject of Research: University-led wealth management education and talent development in Hong Kong

Article Title: HKU Business School launches the first wealth management academy nurturing future leaders and strengthening Hong Kong’s global leadership

Article References: HKU Business School launches the first wealth management academy nurturing future leaders and strengthening Hong Kong’s global leadership. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: HKU Business School, wealth management, Hong Kong, Bank of China, financial services, talent development, private banking, asset management, family offices, fintech, green finance, financial services policy

The core observation is deceptively simple. Much of the water infrastructure in the United States, Europe and Japan was built during the mid-twentieth century, with design lives of fifty to a hundred years now expiring in large waves. The American Society of Civil Engineers’ most recent report card gives the sector grades that reflect chronic underinvestment, while the United Nations University has flagged ageing water storage infrastructure as an emerging global risk. Meanwhile, the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs projects that the share of the world’s population over 65 will continue to climb steeply through mid-century, with the fastest growth in exactly the high-income countries whose networks are oldest. Two ageing curves, one physical and one human, are converging, and the authors contend that engineering asset management alone cannot capture what that convergence means.

The ISAG framework defines the gap as the mismatch between the ageing trajectory of water systems and the evolving needs, capacities and vulnerabilities of the populations those systems serve. The team identifies four interconnected pathways through which the gap emerges. The first concerns escalating demand for reliability: older residents, people with chronic illness and those with limited mobility are far more vulnerable to service interruptions, boil-water advisories and pressure losses. A single-day outage that is an inconvenience to a young, healthy household can become a medical emergency for a dialysis patient or an elderly person living alone. When the customer base ages, the same infrastructure failure produces disproportionately worse human outcomes.

The second pathway runs through the workforce. Water utilities face a well-documented retirement wave among operators, engineers and skilled tradespeople, which compounds the physical ageing of the assets themselves. The tacit knowledge needed to keep a fifty-year-old pumping station running often lives in the heads of workers approaching retirement themselves, and shrinking labour pools in shrinking regions make recruitment harder. The third pathway involves fiscal capacity. Communities with ageing populations often have contracting tax bases and rising social spending commitments, leaving less room for the capital investment that renewal demands. In Japan, where the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism has documented widespread consolidation of small water utilities, the arithmetic of many elderly ratepayers supporting vast buried asset stocks has already become unsustainable for hundreds of small systems.

The fourth pathway is institutional and social: ageing populations can be less able to engage in the public processes, emergency preparations and adaptation planning that resilient water governance requires, and older neighbourhoods are often the ones served by the oldest mains and service lines. The authors organise these four pathways into what they describe as an infrastructure–society ageing decline spiral, in which deteriorating service quality drives out younger and more mobile residents, eroding the fiscal and workforce base still further and accelerating deterioration. Once that spiral takes hold, they argue, conventional repair cycles cannot keep pace, and the gap widens year after year.

To quantify the scale of the problem, the team draws on a broad body of official data: the American Society of Civil Engineers’ infrastructure assessments, Water UK’s economic analysis of asset maintenance and replacement, the Japanese ministry’s reform reviews, the US Army Corps of Engineers’ national levee database, the International Commission on Large Dams’ world register, OECD infrastructure investment outlooks, US Census Bureau demographic estimates and the UN’s world population prospects. A global dataset compiled by Zhang and Gu, published in Scientific Data, provides country-level indicators of infrastructure age. None of these sources alone links demography to infrastructure condition; that synthesis is precisely what the ISAG framework is meant to supply.

The proposal’s practical punchline is a pair of contrasting planning approaches. The first is demographic-blind investment, the status quo in most jurisdictions, in which renewal schedules are set purely by asset condition and risk scoring without reference to who lives downstream, downstream of the pipe, or behind the levee. The second is demographic-aware planning, in which intervention priorities, design standards and resilience investments are adjusted according to the age structure and projected demographic trajectory of the served population. Under the demographic-aware approach, an ageing service area would pull forward replacement of assets whose failure carries high public health consequences, justify higher redundancy in distribution networks serving vulnerable populations, and tilt investment toward measures such as backup power, pressure management and rapid response capacity.

The authors are careful to say the framework is a decision-support concept rather than a formula. Its value, they suggest, lies in making an invisible coupling visible: utilities that benchmark their asset age against demographic projections, and integrate social vulnerability data into risk models, will make different and better-targeted choices than those that do not. The framework spans the full infrastructure life cycle, from planning and design through operation, maintenance, rehabilitation and eventual decommissioning, and the authors argue that demographic ageing should be treated as a first-order design parameter on the same footing as hydrology, hydraulics and structural condition. That represents a significant cultural shift for a profession whose textbooks have historically treated the human population as a static demand number rather than a dynamic, ageing system in its own right.

The timing of the Comment is deliberate. It forms part of a series contributing to the 2026 UN Water Conference, supported by UNU-INWEH as part of the UN-Water initiative to ground water policymaking in evidence. With governments preparing national water security strategies and capital programmes running into the hundreds of billions of dollars, the authors hope the ISAG framing will find its way into regulatory guidance, utility asset management plans and international lending criteria. The stakes, they note, are not merely economic. A water system that fails its most vulnerable users fails everyone’s trust in it, and rebuilding that trust after crises is far more expensive than preventing them. The authors declare no competing interests, and correspondence for the work is handled through Tufts University’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

What the paper ultimately offers is a reframing: the water crisis of ageing infrastructure is also, unavoidably, a social and demographic crisis. Pipes and people are growing old together, and the institutions responsible for water must learn to plan for both at once. If the authors are right, the utilities, ministries and municipalities that internalise this coupling earliest will be the ones that keep taps running safely for the populations that depend on them most.

Subject of Research: A framework for integrating demographic ageing into water infrastructure planning

Article Title: To fix ageing water infrastructure, we must plan for an ageing population

Article References: Vahedifard, F., Azhar, M., Li, J., AghaKouchak, A., Brown, D. C., Marfeo, E., Null, S. E., Spearing, L. A., & Tajik, N. (2026). To fix ageing water infrastructure, we must plan for an ageing population. Nature Water, 4(9), 1062-1067. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44221-026-00711-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s44221-026-00711-z

Keywords: ageing water infrastructure, infrastructure-society ageing gap, demographic ageing, water utilities, water governance, asset management, Nature Water, resilience planning, public health, UN Water Conference, vulnerable populations, infrastructure life cycle

Shu defines urban innovation governance as the institutional rules and organisational arrangements that determine which activities receive recognition and support as innovation. Institutional recognition functions as a filter: it decides whether an activity becomes formally legible and supportable within municipal programmes, procurement systems, and funding streams. Drawing on the Oslo Manual’s definition of innovation as implemented products or processes that differ significantly from previous practice, the paper argues that maintenance can genuinely qualify as innovation. When significantly different materials, analytical tools, construction methods, or organisational processes change how maintenance or renewal is diagnosed, planned, delivered, or monitored, the result is maintenance-related process innovation. A cured-in-place pipe lining that rehabilitates a century-old sewer, or a computer-vision system that classifies defects from closed-circuit television footage, represents implemented technical change of exactly the kind innovation policy claims to reward.

The difficulty, according to the analysis, is that such innovation rarely looks like innovation to the institutions that allocate attention and money. The paper identifies four pathways through which the paradox may arise. The first is programme eligibility: when funding rules treat maintenance primarily as an operating expense rather than a possible site of innovation, operators and utilities are effectively excluded from applying, from defining public innovation challenges, and from having their evidence counted. The second is political visibility. Megaproject research shows how large, conspicuous projects acquire strong political sponsorship, while the benefits of preventive maintenance appear only as service continuity or avoided failure, outcomes that are inherently difficult to attribute to any individual decision-maker. Research on electoral incentives confirms that infrastructure quality can reflect the politics of project selection, with effects that persist well beyond the immediate electoral cycle.

The third pathway runs through organisational attention. Building on Ocasio’s attention-based view of the firm, Shu argues that municipal attention is structured through formal roles and decision processes, and that a high-salience digital programme can draw leadership focus and administrative capacity even when its budget remains formally separate from physical renewal. Attention displacement, on this account, concerns agenda capacity and organisational sequencing as much as expenditure. The fourth pathway concerns lifecycle responsibility. Digital platforms and sensing systems require continuing technical support, data stewardship, and specialist capacity, and smart-city implementation studies repeatedly identify cost, interoperability, long-term finance, and skills constraints as barriers that emerge as pilots move towards durable municipal capability. When ownership and operating arrangements remain unclear, sensors and digital twins deepen lifecycle obligations instead of strengthening stewardship.

Empirical cases give the argument concrete shape. Research on Hamburg’s fibre-optic infrastructure shows that maintenance labour and material systems remain integral to digital urbanism while receiving limited visibility in smart-city imaginaries. Singapore’s Digital Underground initiative sought an integrated representation of subsurface utilities but encountered fragmented data and coordination problems rooted in the material complexity of underground assets. In Barcelona, a sewer-robotics programme demonstrated that innovation policy and robotic technology depended on care and practical coordination within the maintenance setting itself; technical performance was inseparable from the needs of users and the operating environment. These cases reveal that digitalisation increases the importance of reliable asset knowledge and institutional cooperation around maintenance, and that digital representations remain operationally valuable only when organisations keep records aligned with physical conditions and assign responsibility for acting on the information produced.

The engineering content of maintenance innovation is often substantial. The rehabilitation of Los Angeles’s North Outfall Sewer Unit 10 used custom-fabricated fibreglass-reinforced polymer mortar pipe to fit a non-circular trunk sewer beneath active rail infrastructure, with access and bypass arrangements designed around continuing service. Harrisburg’s Front Street Interceptor applied cured-in-place pipe rehabilitation to a 113-year-old non-circular sewer under a newly adopted structural design standard. Automated inspection research has developed sewer-defect classification methods using CCTV images and sequences, while bridge-monitoring studies show how digital twins can combine condition data and intervention histories to support diagnosis and lifecycle decisions. Shu is careful to note that industry reporting supplies project detail rather than comparative evaluation, so these cases serve as bounded illustrations. Their analytical value lies in showing how design adaptation and construction sequencing enable renewal under difficult access and continuous-service constraints, precisely the conditions that define mature urban networks.

The paradox also carries a distributive dimension that aggregate spending figures cannot reveal. Research in Lilongwe, Malawi, demonstrates how everyday operation and maintenance practices can reproduce unequal water continuity and allocation within a single network, while studies across large United States cities show that incomplete household water access is patterned by housing conditions, income, and racial inequality. Maintenance decisions determine who bears service disruption and related environmental or mobility harms. Advanced monitoring can improve diagnosis, but unequal monitoring or unequal response may simply reproduce existing spatial priorities. The assets rendered visible to innovation programmes, in other words, may differ from those most consequential to marginalised communities, giving institutional recognition a territorial dimension that participatory assessment techniques, such as neighbourhood-level infrastructure monitoring developed in Houston, can begin to address.

Importantly, the paper does not claim that narrow innovation framing produces the same outcome everywhere. Strong asset-management institutions can interrupt the proposed pathway, while weak or fragmented arrangements can amplify it. Regulatory standards and protected utility revenues can sustain renewal even when innovation programmes remain digitally oriented, and capable operators may appropriate digital tools for maintenance without relying on an explicit innovation label. Cross-country evidence even indicates that fiscal and political decentralisation can be associated with higher road-maintenance expenditure, a relationship that varies sharply across sectors and institutional designs. Comparative stormwater research shows that similar technologies encounter distinct governance arrangements in Chinese and Swedish cities, and studies of Melbourne’s water transitions highlight the bridging organisations and long-term institutional work required to stabilise new practices. These countervailing conditions form part of any honest empirical test of the paradox.

The governance implications are correspondingly practical. Shu proposes broader programme eligibility, with funding bodies explicitly including innovative inspection, rehabilitation, and asset-management methods in renewal delivery, and requiring applicants to explain how proposed changes improve service reliability, asset life, risk reduction, or equity. Public procurement should permit functional specifications and early dialogue with operators and suppliers, and programme managers should involve maintenance staff in defining challenges and scaling decisions. For digital projects that monitor physical systems, lifecycle coupling means specifying ownership, data stewardship, and the route from monitoring to funded physical action before contracts are signed. Evaluation should follow the chain from information quality to funded decisions and service outcomes, including their spatial distribution, rather than counting technology adoption rates that reveal little about stewardship. Organisational capability, supported by current asset data, procurement expertise, workforce development, and stable renewal leadership across political cycles, ultimately determines whether any of these instruments change established practice.

The framework remains conceptual, and Shu is explicit about its limits: the governance configurations are illustrative, the selected cases are not representative, and institutional recognition must be measured separately from expenditure and asset condition. The proposed research agenda includes comparative documentary analysis of innovation strategies and procurement rules, process tracing of how proposals are filtered before funding, and quantitative tests of whether recognition predicts renewal outcomes after accounting for fiscal capacity and network age. But the central message is already actionable. Digital technologies occupy both sides of the paradox: installed as stand-alone demonstrations they add obligations, but connected to decision rules and funding responsibilities they become genuine maintenance-related process innovation. Cities strengthen innovation capacity, the paper concludes, when maintenance expertise and renewal capability enter the institutional definition of innovation itself, aligning technological ambition with the durable physical systems through which urban life is sustained.

Subject of Research: The urban innovation paradox, in which institutional underrecognition of infrastructure maintenance-related process innovation weakens urban innovation governance and infrastructure renewal.

Article Title: The urban innovation paradox emerges when infrastructure maintenance is underrecognized

Article References: Shu, T. (2026). The urban innovation paradox emerges when infrastructure maintenance is underrecognized. Discover Cities, 3(1), Article 189. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44327-026-00367-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44327-026-00367-0

Keywords: urban innovation, infrastructure maintenance, smart cities, process innovation, infrastructure governance, innovation policy, urban policy, asset management, digital twins, public procurement, organizational attention, infrastructure renewal