Last Updated on September 20, 2026
MBAUniverse.com News Desk
The 3rd IMC International Research Conference (IMC-IRC) 2026, organised by MBAUniverse.com and hosted by IIM Lucknow during the 16th Indian Management Conclave at its Noida Campus on 18-19 September 2026, concluded with the presentation of the IMC-IRC Best Research Paper Awards 2026. The awards recognised the finest research studies across the conference’s five research tracks, selected through a rigorous, peer-reviewed process led by an eminent panel of Track Chairs comprising India’s leading Research Deans and Journal Editors. The IMC IRC 2026 Best Papers Award were awarded to Faiza Khan (BITS Pilani) in Track 1; Reeti Kulshrestha and Vidur J. Dhabaria in Track 2; Kritika Khanna and Arun Kaushik (IIM Amritsar), and Anshul Saxena and Bikramjit Rishi, in Track 3; Srikant Rajan and Jayashree Rammohan in Track 4; and Monika Tanwar and Richa Awasthy in Track 5. Read complete details of each winning study in this article.
The awards were conferred at the IMC 2026 Valedictory Session on 19 September by Mr Tarun Garg, Managing Director & CEO, Hyundai Motor India Limited; Dr Rishikesha T. Krishnan, Vice-Chancellor, Ashoka University and Chair of the IMC Awards 2026 Jury; Dr Amit Agnihotri, Founder & Chair, Indian Management Conclave and Dr Satyabhusan Dash, Dean, Noida Campus, IIM Lucknow. Launched in 2024 during the 14th IMC 2024 at XLRI Jamshedpur, IMC-IRC is South Asia’s premier research conference dedicated to business and management education. It convenes editors, deans, scholars and practitioners who study how management is taught, learned and assessed. Its Best Research Paper Awards are a merit-only honour: papers are selected solely on scholarly quality by the Track Chairs and jury, placing the awards among the most prestigious recognitions available to management-education researchers in the region.
IMC-IRC 2026 Best Research Paper Award Winners
IMC-IRC 2026 drew about 250 extended abstracts from scholars at leading business schools, of which around 100 were accepted for presentation after peer review. From this field, the Track Chairs selected the following as IMC-IRC 2026 Best Research Paper Award Winners.
| Track | Best Research Paper | Author(s)/ Institution |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | AI-Driven Sustainable HRM and Sustainable Performance: The Mediating Role of Employee Resilience | Faiza Khan (BITS Pilani) |
| 2 | India in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: Sectoral Adoption, Cross-Cutting Barriers, Enablers, and the Pathway to Viksit Bharat 2047 | Reeti Kulshrestha (BIMTECH, Greater Noida) Vidur J. Dhabaria (HSNC University, Mumbai) |
| 3 | Extending the I-PACE Model to Explain Generative AI Dependency in Higher Education: A Conceptual Framework | Kritika Khanna; Arun Kaushik (IIM Amritsar) |
| 3 | Designing and Evaluating an AI-Enabled Constructivist Framework for Curriculum Development in Management Education | Anshul Saxena (Symbiosis International University, Pune); Bikramjit Rishi (Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence, NCR) |
| 4 | From Mock Interviews to Diagnostic Learning: Developing an Interview Readiness Framework Using Multi-Source Assessment | Srikant Rajan; Jayashree Rammohan (KREA University) |
| 5 | How Student Entrepreneurs Move from Intention to Action: A Study into the Discovery-Exploitation Transitions | Monika Tanwar; Richa Awasthy (Dr B. R. Ambedkar University Delhi) |
Congratulating the winners, Dr Amit Agnihotri, Founder & Chair, Indian Management Conclave (IMC), said: “IMC-IRC has established itself as South Asia’s leading research conference dedicated to management education, and its Best Research Paper Awards are among the most prestigious honours a management scholar can receive, decided purely on merit by an eminent panel of Research Deans and Journal Editors. I congratulate every award winner, and thank our distinguished Jury and Track Chairs for their careful stewardship of the review process. Selected papers will soon be invited for an upcoming Book Volume, to be published by Emerald, now part of Wiley.”
MBAUniverse.com, the organizer of Indian management Conclave (IMC) and IMC-IRC, proudly presents the highlights of the award winning studies.
Track 1 Best Research Paper: Impact of AI on Work, Jobs and the Workforce
Title: AI-Driven Sustainable HRM and Sustainable Performance: The Mediating Role of Employee Resilience
Author: Faiza Khan (BITS Pilani)
This conceptual study examines how AI-driven sustainable human resource management (AI-SHRM) shapes long-term organisational performance, with employee resilience as the mediating mechanism. Grounded in AMO theory and the Resource-Based View, the paper argues that AI-SHRM personalises HR support and development, building employees’ adaptive capacity, and that resilient employees in turn sustain productivity under pressure. Its central contribution is to position resilience as the link that explains AI-SHRM’s lasting impact, and its practical message is pointed: AI’s value in HR derives not from automation but from personalised support that builds resilient, future-ready workforces. The Track Chairs recognised the paper for the clarity of its theoretical framing and its relevance to how organisations deploy AI in people management.
Track 2 Best Research Paper: Impact of AI on Businesses, Organisations and Markets
Title: India in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: Sectoral Adoption, Cross-Cutting Barriers, Enablers, and the Pathway to Viksit Bharat 2047
Authors: Reeti Kulshrestha (BIMTECH, Greater Noida); Vidur J. Dhabaria (HSNC University, Mumbai)
This qualitative, interpretive study maps AI adoption across India’s major public and private sectors and confronts a striking paradox: although India records among the world’s highest generative-AI app downloads and strong deployment intent, only about 15 per cent of Indian organisations have scaled AI beyond trials. The authors describe a persistent “belief-execution gap,” develop a transferable six-category barrier and enabler framework, and find banking, telecom and manufacturing leading adoption, while public bodies such as the Railways and the India Meteorological Department demonstrate high-impact, national-scale application. Framed through a Viksit Bharat 2047 development lens, the paper calls for stronger data governance, AI literacy, sovereign infrastructure and indigenous models. The Track Chairs noted its ambition as the first cross-sector analysis of AI adoption across India’s non-IT sectors and its direct policy relevance.
Track 3 Best Research Papers: AI-Enabled Curriculum, Pedagogy and Learning
Track 3 recognised two studies, both addressing how generative AI is reshaping learning and curriculum in management education.
Title: Extending the I-PACE Model to Explain Generative AI Dependency in Higher Education: A Conceptual Framework
Authors: Kritika Khanna; Arun Kaushik (IIM Amritsar)
This theory-building paper extends the established I-PACE model to explain generative-AI dependency among university students. It identifies antecedents such as academic anxiety, academic self-efficacy, fear of failure, AI performance expectancy and a sense of perceived indispensability, with academic pressure and institutional support acting as moderators. Rather than treating AI use as simple technology adoption, the framework integrates psychological, affective, cognitive and contextual mechanisms, offering institutions a basis for strategies that promote mindful AI use and protect students’ cognitive engagement and academic autonomy. The Track Chairs valued its conceptual rigour and its timeliness for educators grappling with over-reliance on AI.
Title: Designing and Evaluating an AI-Enabled Constructivist Framework for Curriculum Development in Management Education
Authors: Anshul Saxena (Symbiosis International University, Pune); Bikramjit Rishi (Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence, NCR)
This study designs and evaluates “Bodha-Mitra,” an AI-enabled curriculum-development workshop framework that serves as a constructivist scaffold for management faculty. Grounded in Constructivist Learning Theory and combining expert evaluation, computational measures and qualitative analysis, the framework helped faculty produce coherent, learner-centred and contextually relevant lesson plans across four AI systems, with ChatGPT achieving the highest expert rating (4.49 out of 5), followed by Claude, Gemini and DeepSeek. Its key lesson for educators is that structured prompting works best when paired with faculty judgement, rather than replacing it. The Track Chairs recognised the paper for translating generative AI into a disciplined, evaluable tool for pedagogical design.
Track 4 Best Research Paper: Teaching Methodologies and Pedagogical Innovation
Title: From Mock Interviews to Diagnostic Learning: Developing an Interview Readiness Framework Using Multi-Source Assessment
Authors: Srikant Rajan; Jayashree Rammohan (Visiting Faculty, KREA University)
This design-based study evaluates an Interview Readiness Programme run across two cohorts (roughly 209 and 263 participants) and reframes interview readiness as a dual construct: what a student can demonstrate, and how accurately the student perceives that performance, a quality the authors call calibration. The evaluation finds that self and peer scores systematically exceed faculty scores, and that readiness and calibration are largely independent, so strong performance does not guarantee accurate self-assessment. The paper’s “readiness-calibration zone” framework turns multi-source assessment into differentiated instructional action, giving faculty a practical diagnostic rather than a single readiness score. The Track Chairs recognised its methodological care and its usefulness for placement and career-readiness teaching.
Track 5 Best Research Paper: MBA Competencies, Employability and Entrepreneurship
Title: How Student Entrepreneurs Move from Intention to Action: A Study into the Discovery-Exploitation Transitions
Authors: Monika Tanwar; Richa Awasthy (Dr B. R. Ambedkar University Delhi)
This qualitative study opens up the cognitive architectures by which student entrepreneurs translate intention into functioning businesses. Grounded in Bird’s Theory of Entrepreneurial Competency and the cognitive-entrepreneurship perspective, it uses cognitive mapping of fourteen semi-structured interviews with student and aspiring entrepreneurs in Delhi-NCR to compare the discovery stage (opportunity recognition and planning) with the exploitation stage (resource acquisition, market entry and scaling). The authors identify distinct blockage mechanisms that explain the intention-action gap and recommend that universities shift support from the operational to the cognitive, through peer-founder communities, structured coaching and mentoring. The Track Chairs recognised it as a first comparative study of the discovery-to-exploitation boundary among Indian student entrepreneurs.
IMC IRC Hosts 100+ Research Presentations
Beyond the award-winning studies, IMC-IRC 2026 featured more than 100 research papers presented across the five tracks. Presenters came from IIMs, university business schools and standalone institutions across the country, addressing themes ranging from the future of work and AI in enterprise and markets to curriculum design, teaching innovation and MBA employability. Authors may also submit full papers, at their discretion, to the conference’s partner journals, several of them Scopus-indexed: Global Business Review, FIIB Business Review, Review of Management Literature, Business Perspectives and Research, and Management and Labour Studies. Selected papers will soon be invited for an upcoming Book Volume, to be published by Emerald, now part of Wiley.
IMC-IRC 2026 Track Chairs: Peer Review Led by India’s Finest
Peer review at IMC-IRC 2026 was led by some of India’s most respected Research Deans and Journal Editors. Serving as Track Chairs, they stewarded the review process, selected the Best Research Papers, and offered guidance and feedback to authors across the five tracks. The full panel of Track Chairs is as follows:
Track Chairs: Dr Anjali Bansal, Professor, IIM Lucknow; Dr Arpan Kar, Endowed Chair Professor, DMS & School of AI, IIT Delhi; Dr Debasis Pradhan, Editor, Management and Labour Studies (a journal of XLRI Jamshedpur); Director, TAPMI Manipal; Dr G. Venkat Raman, Professor, IIM Indore; Dr Neerja Pande, Professor, IIM Lucknow Dr Pragya Gupta, Professor of Management (Area Chair - HR & OB), Jaipuria Institute of Management, Noida; Dr Rajesh K Singh, Professor & Chairperson, GP Admissions, MDI Gurgaon; Dr Prakash Singh, Professor, IIM Lucknow; Dr Rajnish Kumar Misra, Dean, JBS, JIIT University Noida; Dr Sachin Kumar Mangla, Dean Research, FORE Delhi; Dr Satyabhusan Dash, Dean, IIM Lucknow Noida Campus (All names in alphabetical order.)
Dr Debasis Pradhan, Editor of XLRI Management and Labour Studies (MLS), a partner publication of IMC IRC 2026, and Track Chair at IMC-IRC 2026, said: “The quality of scholarship at IMC-IRC rises with each edition. IMC-IRC has become a genuine home for research in management education in South Asia, and I congratulate the award winners on work that is both rigorous and relevant. Like every year, MLS shall consider the best of papers for publication. Authors are requested to submit through the journal portal.”
IMC-IRC 2026 Book of Abstracts Released
The IMC-IRC 2026 Book of Abstracts was released at the conference under the prestigious IMC Publication Series. Edited by Dr Amit Agnihotri and Dr Satyabhusan Dash (Dean, Noida Campus, IIM Lucknow) and published under the IMC Publication Series (First Edition, 2026; ISBN 978-81-180024-0-6), the volume compiles all accepted abstracts across the five tracks, together with the conference theme, track structure, jury and partner-journal details.
For deans, editors and faculty, it offers a single, citable reference to the year’s scholarship in management learning and education. Institutions and scholars wishing to order copies may write to [email protected].
Editors’ Panel: “Management Research in the Age of AI”
A highlight of IMC-IRC 2026 was the Editors’ Panel on “Management Research in the Age of AI.” The use of AI tools in research and publication is growing rapidly. While some studies point to their benefits, editors caution that authors must use these tools judiciously and retain full responsibility for their work. The panel brought together distinguished editors to examine the evolving landscape of research in the age of generative AI: how these tools are reshaping research design, methodology and publishing, and the critical questions they raise around ethics, originality and academic rigour.
The session was addressed by Dr Satyabhusan Dash, Dean, Noida Campus, IIM Lucknow; Dr Arpan Kar, Professor & Chair in Information Systems, IIT Delhi; and Dr Debasis Pradhan, Editor, Management and Labour Studies (a journal of XLRI Jamshedpur) and Director, TAPMI Manipal. The session was moderated by Dr Raj Krishnan Shankar, Director, Great Lakes Institute of Management, Gurgaon.
Addressing the scholars, Dr Arpan Kar said: “The use of AI tools in research and publication is growing rapidly. However, authors must use these tools judiciously and retain full responsibility for their work. The future of research in age of AI is full of new possibilities, and editors and scholars should embrace the change, rather than resist it.” He further added, “IMC International Research Conference is growing into a unique destination for research in management education and AI. I have been associated with IMC IRC since the start in 2024. I compliment Founder Dr Amit Agnihotri for initiating this important platform.”
MLS Special Issue with IMC IRC 2025 Papers Released
At the Editors’ Panel, a Special Issue of Management and Labour Studies (MLS), the Scopus-indexed journal edited by Dr Debasis Pradhan, was released, featuring selected papers presented at IMC-IRC 2025. The release illustrates the conference’s role as a pipeline from presentation to peer-reviewed publication: strong IMC-IRC papers are developed into full manuscripts and published in reputed journals, extending the reach of Indian scholarship on management education to a global readership.
IMC IRC 2026 Papers Invited for Volume by Emerald Publishing, UK
Selected papers will soon be invited for an upcoming Book Volume titled “The Future of Business & Management Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence”, to be published by Emerald UK.
The Volume Editors are Dr Amit Agnihotri, Founder, Indian Management Conclave; Dr. Deepak Khazanchi, Professor and Executive Director of the University of Nebraska Center for Management of IT, USA and Dr Rajnish K. Misra, Dean, JBS, JIIT University. The series editors are Dr Tanya Bondarouk of University of Twente, Netherlands and Dr Miguel Olivas-Lujan, Pennsylvania Western University, USA.
Announcing this opportunity for scholars who presented papers at IMC IRC 2026, Volume Editor Dr Amit Agnihotri said: “Artificial intelligence is transforming how management is taught, learned, researched, and assessed. Yet systematic scholarship on these shifts, particularly in the Indian and emerging-economy context, remains sparse. This volume invites original empirical, conceptual, and pedagogical contributions that examine how AI is reshaping business and management education.” He further added, “Volume Editors are pleased to invite selected papers from the IMC IRC 2026 for consideration and potential publication. Authors of selected studies will receive an initiation with submission guidelines soon.”
Read key highlights of IMC 2026, only on MBAUniverse.com, India’s No.1 MBA portal:
