In his inaugural address, Professor Ajit Chaturvedi, Director IIT Roorkee, emphasized upon the importance of knowledge enabled economies and explained the purpose behind government's initiatives to increase the number of technical and management education institutes across the country. He further emphasized to promote the synergy between various educational institutions for development of innovative technologies. "Innovation is important but equally important is its business implications" he said. Prof. Chaturvedi also hoped that knowledge sharing and collaborations between IIM Sirmaur and IIT Roorkee shall generate impactful research and serve larger perspectives in the region around.

Prof. Rishikesh T. Krishnan in his Keynote speech talked in detail about the challenges of innovation in digital era. He commented that digital technologies are playing an important role in innovations, adapted by various industries like manufacturing, insurance, healthcare etc. Digital technologies are helping businesses to develop data-driven and customer centric products & services. He opined that businesses are using analytical capabilities of computer machines to continuously refine their products & services to serve their customer better. In addition, emerging technologies like artificial intelligence are revolutionizing everything starting from individual to businesses and the governments. However, he mentioned that this is also bringing challenges in terms of how humans will be brought back to this digital equation. 'Progress in industrial developments is seeing some new trends from automation to augmentation', he emphasized. Dr. Krishnan specially mentioned that the future role of the leader in organizations will be to work as chief experimenter. Since the cost of experiments is decreasing in digital era, the role of the leader will be to make sure that the experiments are made more rigorous.

Professor Neelu Rohmetra Director, IIM Sirmaur in her presiding remarks said that international conference on the current theme at IIM Sirmaur, is its maiden attempt and has received good response. She emphasized that most of the problems of our country need innovation and innovative strategies to solve the basic problems and address the indigenous contexts. She hoped that management education and research should now start connecting to the needs at the grassroots. Dr. Rohmetra also elaborated upon future initiatives of the Institute in terms of launching of new programmes and other initiatives in collaborative format. Professor Rohmetra hoped that deliberations over the technical sessions will generate recommendations for future policy formulation and send some useful messages across stakeholders.'

The conference 'Book of abstracts' was released during the inaugural ceremony.

Prof. Pragya Bhawsar Conference Convener welcomed the guests and elaborated on the conference details. Prof. Vikas Kumar presented the formal vote of thanks to the participatory delegates.

During the day, Shri Nilay D Kapoor, Chief General Manager NABARD presented a talk on the topic 'Business Interventions of NABARD in Himachal Pradesh'. A panel discussion was also organized on 'Building an innovative workforce: identifying talent, learning, and technology challenges". The panelist were CA Ravi - Founder & CEO - AltEd Pro & Medad Media, Rohit Verma - Director - Program Management Baker Hughes, Siddharth Patnaik- PwC Learning & Development Mr. Rupak Aggarwal Founder Evueme Robots and Former Business Head Godrej Properties, Mr. Sanjay Banerjee Partner at Amrop India.

In the post lunch parallel technical sessions, the delegates presented their research papers along various sub themes. Pertinent to mention that the conference has attracted large number of academics and researchers, who are presenting their research work over two days at IIM Sirmaur, Himachal Pradesh. NABARD and Wiley are co-sponsors of the conference.

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