Call for Proposals
As India shakes off the shackles of its past and emerges on the world stage as a rapidly modernizing and progressive nation, it poses a number of challenges and opportunities to strategic thinkers, industry leaders, and policy makers around the world. From the perspective of Indian firms, the challenge revolves around developing platforms for innovation and growth that will sustain their meteoric rise onto the world stage as emerging multinationals. From the perspective of Western firms, the rise of India poses opportunities as well as fundamental challenges. While access to a potential one billion customers poses large untapped opportunities, the very unique milieu in India and the competition from resurgent and ambitious Indian firms poses learning challenges.
From this platform, a set of intriguing questions arise: How can Indian companies put innovation at the heart of their business strategy and organizational culture? How can they harness their entrepreneurial skills to build world-class businesses? What’s next for India as it further integrates into the world economy? How are India’s leading retailers, banks, pharmaceutical companies and other service providers turning the country into a center for innovation? How should India Inc. help bolster the relatively weak innovation eco-system and infrastructure in the country? How can Indian firms manage overseas growth and integrate Western businesses into their fold? How can Indian firms innovate to face the challenges from challengers such as China and other emerging markets? Similarly, how can Western companies learn to compete in the new world? How can they tap into the disruptive power of innovations that are finding expression at the bottom of the pyramid and scale that into their existing markets? How can they morph themselves so that they are proactive participants in the new age? More broadly, what are the opportunities for creating new insights for strategic management by focusing on the business activities in emerging markets such as India?
In this spirit of integrating global strategy with India strategy, and to develop longer term roots in the Indian context, the SMS is launching its first India-focused special conference. Although the conference is being held in India and the focus will be on the Indian business context, we are open to receiving papers that bring in relevant insights from other emerging markets.
Potential topics include (but are not limited to):
- Emerging market firms’ strategies in global markets
- New models of Multinational Firm Strategies
- Corporate governance in Indian firms
- Evolution in Offshoring and Outsourcing Models
- Entrepreneurship in India
- Industry restructuring and evolution
- Global M&A activities by Indian firms
- Multinational R&D centers in India
- Organizational learning practices in Indian firms
- Strategies related to the development of new technologies
- Using alliances to gain a competitive advantage in India
- Micro-finance
- The role of PSUs, NGOs and emerging public-private partnerships
- Innovations at the bottom of the pyramid
Submission Guidelines and Requirements:
Invited are proposals (5-7 pages, for paper and panel sessions) relating to the conference theme or on matters of interest to the field of strategic management in India. Only original, unpublished work is sought and must be submitted online by July 1, 2008. Click here for more information about the submission process and guidelines.