~ “All sections of the economy, public sector, private sector, and academia have to come together in order to create a domestically strong and resilient economy.” – said Dr. V. Anantha Nageswaran, Chief Economic Advisor to the Government of India

~ “We have to reconfigure the ways in which we use AI.” – said Professor Noshir Contractor, Professor of Behavioural Sciences from Northwestern University, Illinois

~ The three-day mega event, scheduled from December 7-9, 2024, is jointly being organised by the 10 Research Centres of the Institute on the theme of “Confluence of Growth, Sustainability, and Resilience”

~ The conference is being held with 11 parallel tracks for the dynamic exchange of ideas that promises to shape the future of management research in the country

December 09, 2024: Spearheading meaningful deliberations on the theme of Growth, Sustainability, and Resilience to shape the future of India-centric management research, the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIMA) formally inaugurated the first edition of the India Management Research Conference (IMRC 2024) on December 08, 2024. The inaugural ceremony was graced by Dr. V. Anantha Nageswaran, Chief Economic Advisor to the Government of India; Professor Noshir Contractor, Jane S. & William J. White Professor of Behavioural Sciences at Northwestern University, Illinois; Professor Bharat Bhasker, Director of IIMA; Professor Debjit Roy, Institute Chair Professor in the Operations and Decision Sciences area and Convener of IMRC 2024; esteemed faculty members; and distinguished guests.

The inaugural ceremony was followed by two enlightening keynote addresses. Delivering the first keynote address, Dr. V. Anantha Nageswaran shared profound insights on India’s economic trajectory, including some of the extraordinary challenges that we face, and how we can address them. He said, “India’s trade, socio-economic, and infrastructural policies from the past few years have begun to bear fruits. Our rank in the World Bank’s Logistics Performance Index (LPI) has also improved from 44 th in 2018 to 38 th in 2023. We continue to strive for better but it’s important to put things in perspective as well. We have to understand that we live in a world of much greater uncertainties, and we need to think of much smarter ways to deal with arising challenges. The political and geoeconomic environment is evolving, and going forward, we are not counting on external/export demand as an important driver of growth. We also need a more holistic and smarter way of thinking about climate change and energy transition, the socio-economic challenges of Artificial Intelligence, Chinese dominance in manufacturing, and so on. That is why all sections of the economy, public sector, private sector, and academia have to come together in order to create a domestically strong and resilient economy in terms of policies, education, and skill availability tailored to India’s needs. I think conferences such as this are an important part of the process of engaging policymakers, academics, and practitioners for the purpose of addressing India’s unique development challenges.”

In the second keynote address, Professor Noshir Contractor talked about ‘Tackling Societal Grand Challenges: Present and Future’, including Accelerating Innovation, Scaling up Global Health Solutions, Missions to Mars, and Human AI at Work. He elaborated on various technical studies and innovative projects they have done that address these challenges. He said, “From the time of the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE) to today’s era of Generative AI, we have to learn some lessons. If we think of AI as a substitute, it’s not really going to help us. If we think of AI as a means to do more, it is also not going to entirely help us very much because it will increase the gap between the haves and have-nots in society. We have to reconfigure the ways in which we use AI.” He further added, “All of the big challenges that we face today are multi-faceted. If we do not create opportunities and synergies to interact as individuals, scholars, and practitioners for a dialogue on these aspects we will not be able to make substantial progress in addressing these challenges. The vision of IIMA in organising IMRC and bringing scholars of 11 different tracks together is only appropriate in this direction.”

Earlier to keynote talks, Professor Bharat Bhasker, Director, IIMA, delivered an inaugural address and said, “India is at a pivotal moment because despite the world has gone through a tumultuous period in past five to six years, our economy has been steadily growing. We also faced the lingering effect of Covid-19, but it also provided us with an opportunity to become the digital leader in the world. Yet the challenge against the world as well as India is advanced robotics, AI, and automated and flexible manufacturing, and to address them and drive this economy, we need more skilled and educated people who are well-trained with new methods and techniques to address our problems and provide practitioners more effective solutions to the management problems that they encounter. To support the emerging community of management scholars in India, we aim to establish IMRC as a platform through which Indian researchers can come together and address the current as well as the future problems of this country.”

The second day of IMRC 2024 brought Directors of seven leading management institutes together for an insightful panel discussion on the “Future of Management Education”. Professor Bharat Bhasker, IIM Ahmedabad; Professor Debashis Chatterjee, IIM Kozhikode; Professor Arvind Sahay, MDI Gurgaon; Professor Bhimaraya Metri, IIM Nagpur; Professor Ashok Banerjee, IIM Udaipur; Professor Rishikesha T Krishnan, IIM Bangalore; Professor Pawan Kumar Singh, IIM Tiruchirappalli; along with the session moderator Professor Neharika Vohra, IIM Ahmedabad, deliberated on the challenges and opportunities in management education. The industry is evolving rapidly and technologies such as Large Language Models (LLMs) and AI are going to change the way of teaching-learning as well, hence, institutions must focus more on project-based and experiential learning. They also emphasised that in spite of the availability of information at the fingertips with the help of AI- based tools, originality of thoughts cannot come without going through the struggle with basic things for quality research.

The need for building the capacity of young faculty members with global exposure and developing a research ecosystem for them was also underlined. The distinguished panellists discussed the role of IMRC in shaping the future of management education as it provides exposure to high-quality research presentations to help participants develop their ideas and helps India’s management schools access a high-quality pool of faculty applicants efficiently through the networking forum. They opined that as long as we continue to evolve, adapt, be relevant to the students, bring diversity to the class, and have our research and pedagogy tuned into the reality of life around us, we will not be just surviving but thriving as a discipline.

The first edition of IMRC 2024 received an overwhelming response with more than 1200 abstract submissions from 21 countries; nearly 450 research paper presentations; and more than 800 attendees, including research scholars, academicians, and industry practitioners, from 600+ institutions and organisations from India and abroad. The event provided them with an exceptional opportunity to network, explore, and discuss diverse research themes and enter into meaningful collaborations.

IMRC 2024 is being held with 11 parallel tracks for the dynamic exchange of ideas. In some of the track-specific events on the second day, the ‘Entrepreneurship: Facilitators & Hurdles Related to Scaling Up of Startups’ track, hosted a session led by Prof. Vaibhav Bhamoriya, titled “Entrepreneurial Ecosystems for Tech-Based Inclusion” and brought together researchers and professionals to discuss the evolving dynamics of entrepreneurial ecosystems (EEs) in India. The ‘Management in Health Services’ track, organised two panel discussions on ‘Financing Innovation in Healthcare’ and ‘Vision 2047 - Health for All’. The track on ‘Gold & Precious Metals: Business and Economic Policies’ started with a keynote address by Mr. Swaminathan Gurumurthy who shared his insights on India’s Gold: Transforming Economic Weakness into National Prosperity. The ‘Behavioral Science in Management’ track held a panel discussion on “The Psychology of Risk-Taking in Financial Decision-Making”.

The Transportation and Logistics track commenced its sessions for the second day with a tutorial on “Deterministic to Distributionally Ambiguous Optimization Tools for Transportation and Logistics Problems”, by Prof. Manish Bansal from the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Virginia Tech, followed by an engaging keynote session by Prof. Vinod Singhal from the Scheller College of Business at Georgia Institute of Technology. The participants of the ‘Leadership Research & Practice in the Context of Changes in the World of Work’ track got to attend a panel discussion titled ‘Organisation Development: New Frontiers in Emerging Times Insights for Practice and Academia’ and a keynote address titled ‘Management Research in India and Opportunity for Consilience’. For the ‘Data Science & Artificial Intelligence’ track, Prof. Samrat Gupta, Associate Professor in the Information Systems area delivered the first keynote session that covered key topics related to social networks and analysis and gave participants a comprehensive overview of the characteristics and properties of social networks. They also hosted multiple oral presentations covering a range of topics related to the use of Data Science and AI.

The three-day mega event, scheduled from December 7-9, 2024, is jointly being organised by the 10 Research Centres of IIMA on the theme of “Confluence of Growth, Sustainability, and Resilience”.

About IIM Ahmedabad:

The Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIMA) is a premier global management Institute that is at the forefront of promoting excellence in the field of management education. In more than six decades of its existence, the Institute has been acknowledged for its exemplary contributions to scholarship, practice and policy through its distinctive teaching, high-quality research, nurturing future leaders, supporting industry, government, social enterprise and creating a progressive impact on society.

IIMA was founded as an innovative initiative by the Government, industry, and international academia in 1961. Since then, it has been consolidating its global footprint and today it has a network with over 80 top international institutions and a presence in Dubai. Its eminent faculty members and more than 44,000 alumni, who are at the helm of influential positions in all walks of life also contribute to its global recognition. Over the years, IIMA’s academically superior, market-driven, and socially impactful programmes, have earned high reputation and acclaim globally. It became the first Indian institution to receive international accreditation from EQUIS. The Institute is also placed first in the Government of India’s National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF), India Rankings 2024. The Institute has been ranked 43rd globally in the Financial Times (FT) Executive Education Rankings 2024. The renowned flagship two-year Post Graduate Programme in Management (PGP) is ranked 39th in the FT Masters in Management Ranking 2024 and the one-year Post Graduate Programme in Management for Executives (PGPX) has been ranked 41st in the FT Global MBA rankings 2024.

IIMA offers consultancy services and more than 200 curated executive education programmes in customised, blended, and open enrolment formats for a diverse audience comprising business leaders, policymakers, industry professionals, academicians, government officials, armed forces personnel, agri-business and other niche sector specialists and entrepreneurs.

To know more about the Institute, please visit: https://www.iima.ac.in/

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