Already for the fifth time, the BMW Foundation Herbert Quandt gathered young leaders from business, academia, politics and the media for the Europe Asia Young Leaders Forum, thereby underscoring its aim of giving a permanent structure to the European-Asian dialogue and the personal exchange between participants from both regions. This initiative was supported once again by the China Europe International Business School (CEIBS) in Shanghai, and the NUS Entrepreneurship Centre in Singapore.

The approximately 50 participants and speakers from 15 European and Asian countries met for three days in Hanoi to discuss the issue of knowledge and knowledge transfer in the European-Asian context.

The focus of the first conference session was on the transmission of knowledge and technology both within companies and in international cooperation. Here, the discussion revolved mostly around the example of China, which has long shed its image as "extended workbench" and recipient of technology transfer. Increasingly, China sees itself as a knowledge power ready to compete with the Western industrial nations.

The second conference session took as its subject the conditions for innovations and creative thinking. Here, it became apparent that the debate on to what extent schools and universities are able to teach core competencies and future-oriented knowledge is not only a controversial one in Germany and Europe, but also in the Asian countries. Given the participants' broad spectrum of experience and diverse cultural backgrounds, it came as little surprise that the session witnessed an exciting discussion about cultural influences on our ways of thinking and on how we deal with knowledge.

The European countries still have a significant advantage when it comes to know-how about environment- and resource-friendly technologies, the concluding panel agreed. The key issues of this panel were how the rapidly growing Asian countries, whose economic growth is partly accompanied by major environmental destruction, can profit from this knowledge and which potential opportunities for closer cooperation between Europe and Asia can be identified in this sector.

Activities outside of the conference room, such as the team-building "Networking in Nature" programme in rural Co Loa or the visit to a German-Vietnamese building project at the outskirts of Hanoi, provided insights into today's Vietnam and additional opportunities to get to know each other.