As a part of the 5th International Economics Conference-2019 on the theme of “Economic Growth and Sustainable Development: Emerging Trends” held on November 15-16, 2019 a panel discussion was organized. The topic was ‘Sustainability & Business Economy’. Dr. Gavin Melles, Professor of Sustainability, Swinburne University, Australia, Dr. Rajagopal R, Founder & CEO, KnowGenix, Mumbai and Ms. Jyotsna Belliappa, Head- CSR Assurance at BlueSky were the expert panel speakers. The panelists highlighted that the Indian corporates possess adequate knowledge about sustainability and CSR, but they also need to invest in their systems and people. The transformation of CSR from a philanthropic perspective to a sustainability was also discussed and the panelists opined that CSR should be more from a humanitarian perspective than a business practice. The discussion was moderated by Dr. M.R. Suresh, Professor-Marketing at SDMIMD.

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SDMIMD organized a talk by alumnus Mr Pramod Padmaprabhaiah as part of the Prerana Alumni Lecture Series on November 25, 2019. Mr Pramod is currently working with NTT Data Services as Global Enterprise Applications Leader.

In his talk, Mr Pramod presented the concept of ‘Gig Economy’ and explained how small activities become a part of Gig Economy extending a monetary benefit. Mr Pramod mentioned that scaling some activities in terms of monetary value can be a complex task at times and the law-making bodies find it difficult to make policies for these. It is believed that 2023 over 6 million people will be a part of the Gig Economy. The speaker explained how Bloggers, Youtubers, Craftspeople, Stack photographers, Freelancers, Software and Web designers constitute and influence Gig Economy. Further, he touched upon the characteristics of the Gig economy with examples of ‘Kaggle’ and ‘Amazon Mechanical Turk’. The talk concluded with the discussion on the four major connections in the Gig Economy i.e. Place, Routines, Purpose and People.