ABOUT 18TH IEF

Introduction

If entrepreneurship is to have significant impact on economic and social development then it has to mean much more than the process of creating new businesses! Unpacking this imperative could help us grasp the sense of a permanent revolution of imagination, of the mutuality of the arts, the humanities, technology and science that underpins the creation of something new. In our constant critical endeavor to make sense of the economics and sociology of change that entrepreneurship promises, we may have overlooked the dynamics of art in technology and the technology that cultivates both new art forms and the sustainability of our evolving social or economic institutions. Perhaps it is time for different reckoning!

The 18th International Entrepreneurship Forum conference will enable a reckoning of alternative visions and received wisdom about entrepreneurship in society. Our conference theme, stated above, will cultivate discourse and action-oriented thinking about how our ways of observing entrepreneurial activity can invoke John Berger’s idea of seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world. It will aim to showcase entrepreneurial endeavor as an engagement with neighbourhoods and citizens to upturn notions of crime through the lenses of epidemiology as they have accomplished in Glasgow. It will celebrate the rigour of mindset change and praxis that informs the well-researched legal arguments of two female lawyers in humanizing the struggles of the of the LGBT community in the world’s largest democracy. The conference will encourage participants to identify algorithms and the future of machine learning that releases space and time for the collective imagination of public enterprise. It will offer platforms for exploring how alternative finance asks new questions about the future value of money. It will enquire whether all things entrepreneurial can facilitate greater inequality or constrain social and institutional responsibility. And we will support the nurturing of innovative SMEs, new firms and ecosystems. Above all the conference will consider how entrepreneurship can be functionally and epistemologically engaged with other social and economic norms that underpin sustainable diversity as opposed to a sense of corralled inclusivity.

The International Entrepreneurship Forum has for the past few years worked in partnership with Banglanatak.com in India to develop a platform for entrepreneurship as a social movement. We will build on this partnership. We will do this in Goa in December 2019, where art, technology and entrepreneurship will combine to seek for economic and social development what the latter demands from our people, our communities, our institutions and our environments. We will work together to nudge entrepreneurship as a social movement.

Conference Curators

Jay Mitra,
Essex Business School, University of Essex
University of Essex

Amitava Bhattacharya
banglanatak dot com
Kolkata, India.