SP Jain Institute of Management and Research’s mission is to influence practice and promote value-based growth. SPJIMR Business Academia Conclave (SBAC) is a flagship annual event where business leaders and academicians come together to discuss how the faculty can contribute towards fulfilling the aspirations of businesses.
The theme of last year’s SBAC was ‘innovation and social sensitivity’. The event attracted four major CEOs, over 50 CXOs and participants from industry and academia.
This year, SBAC — conducted in partnership with Founding Fuel — was held on January 20 at Trident BKC. The theme was ‘corporations and start-ups: collaborating to innovate’. The design on the cover picture highlighted the theme — a formal shoe on one leg and a trendy, casual one on the other.
Over a 100 top managers and entrepreneurs from different fields attended the event. The keynote address was by Mohanbir Sawhney, a senior professor in the marketing department at Kellogg School of Management, who has won many business awards and has multiple best-selling books to his name. He spoke on ‘how to dance with start-ups’ and why big corporates should collaborate with start-ups in a positive manner. He also explained that start-ups which are creative, fast and pathologically optimistic can add value to the slow, realistic but financially structured and powerful corporates.
The panel discussion — with Shankar Maruwada, Co-founder, EkStep, and Sanjay Purohit, Strategic Advisor, EkStep — revolved around how businesses can learn from entrepreneurial journeys, how corporates and start-ups can come together to grow exponentially, and how platform-thinking can be used to drive societal change.
Other speakers included R Gopalkrishnan (author, business stalwart, and executive-in-residence at SPJIMR), Kishore Biyani (Chairman & CEO, Futures group), Suresh Narayanan (CMD, Nestle India), Sanjay Gupta (MD, Star India), and Larry Paulson (President, Qualcomm India).