ABOUT THE CONFERENCE

From the time that Clayton Christensen (1997) highlighted the concept of disruption due to innovation, and its impact on businesses and economies, practitioners and researchers have diverted their attention to the evil it casts and the opportunities it presents. Innovations and improvements in technologies have more often than not resulted in disruption of business models prevalent at that time. The three industrial revolutions have marked definitive shifts in performance and perspectives, and now the world awaits the outcome of the industrial revolution 4.0. Disruptions do not come only from revolutions. This is evident from the very recent incidence of the Coronavirus variants taking over the world and causing disruptions not only in commerce but in every walk of life: businesses have suffered, nations have faced considerable economic losses, and the social life, as we knew it, had come to a standstill. Studies into the various modes of disruption show that businesses that proactively face the challenges that disruptions present, and prepare themselves for the outcomes, have a greater chance of survival than those that wait to ride the wave (Maxwell and Christensen, 2012).

Following up on Gans' (2016) observation that management academics had not really researched on the main issues of disruption, a steady stream of interest has been diverted towards studying the concept as a phenomenon (Gans, 2016) as well as a process (Cozzolino, Verona, and Rothaermel, 2018) in areas such as technology (Skog, Wimelius, and Sandberg, 2018), education (García-Morales, Garrido-Moreno, & Martín-Rojas, 2021; Mishra, Gupta, and Shree, 2020), global disasters (Crick, Crick, and Chaudhry, 2021), service industry (Pemer, 2021), management (Volberda, Bosch, and Heij, 2018), finance (Bussmann, 2017; Jiafu & Rau, 2021), and marketing (Dev, Shankar, Zacharia, & Swami, 2021), to name a few.

The IBA-SBS International Conference (IBA-SBSIC) aims to provide a platform for scholars, professionals, and policymakers from all over the world to share the latest research on globalized businesses' burning questions. The conference theme for IBA-SBSIC 2023 is sustainability, which involves balancing economic, social, and environmental factors to ensure long-term viability. The conference invites contributions from scholars in Management, Marketing, Finance, Accounting, and Law tracks to discuss the opportunities and challenges sustainability presents businesses. The event aims to provide unique opportunities and challenges to further the knowledge and understanding of businesses and policy connections needed to progress towards sustainability.