Bengaluru: The two-day 8th IMR Doctoral Conference (IMRDC) organized by Indian Institute of Management Bangalore’s IIM Bangalore Management Review (IMR) and the Office of the Fellow Programme in Management (FPM) was inaugurated on 11 January 2017 at IIM Bangalore. “Indian scholars need to systematically work towards being at the frontiers of management knowledge production,” said Prof. K. Sudhir while delivering the SBI Life keynote lecture on ‘Management Research in the Age of Big Data’ after inaugurating the conference.
Prof. Sudhir, who is James L. Frank Professor of Marketing, Private Enterprise and Management and Director of the Yale China India Insights (CIIP) Program, Yale School of Management, and Editor-in-Chief, Marketing Science, discussed different inspirations, possibilities, as well as contributions that Indian scholars can make in the field of research in the future.
“Big Data and Analytics is a new buzzword today and this has a huge impact on the way we teach management, management policies, and management research.” Discussing the key elements of Big Data, which he termed the ‘3Vs’ – Volume, Velocity and Variety, he explained: “With Big Data, we know a lot more about consumers, and information is power. Hence, we can take informed decisions. So the most critical fact is how we train management students in the future. It will also lead to evidence-based decision making as we have seen in the healthcare industry. It will also minimize or eliminate organization silos and promote cross-functional activity.”
“As a country’s policy, we need to improve training of PhD students, and provide infrastructural support and mentoring opportunities from leading scholars. There can be a consortium across Indian scholars for PhD training. With feasible proactive action, Indian scholars can be at the frontier of knowledge production. Big Data and Analytics will move management education towards evidence-based management,” he explained.
Earlier in the day, while welcoming the participants to the conference, Professor Raghavan Srinivasan, Director Incharge, IIM Bangalore, said, “All of you belong to institutions which in the last decade or two have put a lot of emphasis on research. Out of 1,200 students, we currently have, 130 are doctoral students, and we hope that at least 20 of them will convocate this year. We have updated our doctoral programme from the DBA model, where you spend the first year with PGP students and you are trained to be a professional teacher and do research, to a formal doctoral programme, where you are the researcher and in the way of becoming a teacher. So events like this are important to develop research capabilities.”
The IMR Doctoral Conference is a benchmark event in India’s doctoral student community in management which has been commended, in particular, by participants for the useful and constructive feedback provided through its ‘one exclusive discussant per paper’ format. Papers selected for the conference will be considered for publication in IIMB Management Review.
The second day of the IMR Doctoral Conference (IMRDC) 2016-2017 also has a line-up of distinguished speakers, including invited talks by Professor Debasis Mishra, Economics and Planning Unit, Indian Statistical Institute, Delhi, on ‘Recent Developments in Auction Design’ and by Professor Sathyajit Gubbi, Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Groningen, on ‘Academic Research: From Inspiration to Publication’.
The two-day event will wrap up with the valedictory ceremony and certificate presentation. This year, the Conference Chairs are Dr. Souvik Dutta, IIMB faculty of Economics & Social Sciences, and IIMB Young Faculty Research Chair, and Dr. Prithwiraj Mukherjee, IIMB faculty from the Marketing area, and IIMB Young Faculty Research Chair.
