Author Description

4C’s; Communication, Commerce, Connectivity and Culture are the building blocks of an economy. How well an economy will grow or perform will depend on how strong these four pillars are. Communication leads to sharing of information among individuals. It is important for any business to have the right kind of communication channel. Commerce, provides goods and services for the society and its people. Connectivity provides the right infrastructure and system for those goods and services to reach the market. Lastly, culture helps to retain the indigenous value in those. SIMSARC 2018, organised by Symbiosis Institute of Management Studies, focussed on the aforementioned idea and invited eminent speakers from academia and industry, all over the world, to share their views on the importance of the 4Cs; Communication, Commerce, Connectivity and Culture for businesses and society. The conference had 4 sub-themes viz. Communication, Commerce, Connectivity and Culture which were the plenary sessions for the conference. The highlight of the “communication: Role of AI, Big Data and IoT in Business” track was the papers which were from broad range of Internet of things (IoT), big data, role of technology, Artificial Intelligence among other aspects of communication. The panel speakers gave insight as to how communication is important for business not only for across boundaries but within a country as well. Another session was on “Culture: An indigenous way” where speakers deliberated on the cultures prevailing in different organisations, countries and societies. From a ‘we together’ attitude in some country to a ‘me first’ attitude in the other, cultural similarities and dissimilarities across nations were discussed in this track. The session witnessed some relevant questions from the audience on issues of language barriers and its effect on businesses. Language and cultural barriers are something which are inevitable but one needs to be adoptive and should learn languages to mi