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According to the World Economic Forum, the Fourth Industrial Revolution is affecting four important aspects of businesses, namely, customer expectations, product enhancement, collaboration and organizational structure. There is an impending need in this era of Industry 4.0 to understand the convergence of the management practices in various functional areas of management to support the rapidly changing needs of the transformed business environment.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution or Industry 4.0 represents a fundamental change in the way we live, work and interact with one another. The revolution has disrupted almost every industry. It includes all those new technologies that have transformed the entire system of production, management, and governance by converging the physical, digital and biological worlds. Industry 4.0 represents combinations of cyber-physical systems, the Internet of Things, Cloud Computing and Cognitive Computing.

In this context a National Conference on Convergence of Management Practices in the Era of Industry 4.0 is being organized by the School of Management, National Institute of Technology Karnataka, Surathkal as part of the NITK Diamond Jubilee Year (2019-20) celebrations.

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The conference aims:

• To provide an intellectual platform where emerging research ideas focusing on Industry 4.0. can be discussed.
• To facilitate the sharing of knowledge among the stakeholders including academicians and practitioners on new aspects of cross-functional research in management in the era of Industry 4.0.
• To understand the challenges or issues that businesses face in implementing Industry 4.0 principles and deliberate upon the solutions to those issues.

The Conference aims at bringing together academicians, researchers, policy makers and other stakeholders from different parts of the country to deliberate their issues concerning the theme.

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