Premier B-school Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A) today said it has initiated the process of setting up a fund which shall provide support to research on emerging economies.

"We are planning to set up a research fund that will provide support not only to the IIM-A faculty but to faculty from anywhere who is working on emerging economy," Director IIM-A Dr Samir Barua said.

He was speaking at the 4th binneial IIM-A Conference on 'Marketing in Emerging Economies', which has emerged as a global platform over the last six years to disseminate research pertaining to marketing.

"Although, the fund size is not known, but it will be a substantially large fund as its objective is to provide support to research on emerging economies from all over the world," Piyush Kumar Sinha, a member of IIM-A conference co-ordination committee said.

"Faculty of any business school working on emerging economies can send their proposal to IIM-A and seek funding from institution once the fund is launched. There is no fixed timeline for the launch of this fund, but we are expecting that it should be up and running very soon, probably by November," Sinha said.

He added that the fund would be consolidation of the past and present conferences. Since the conference series began in 2005, a total of 1,011 abstracts on the topic have been received by the institute. This year alone 441 abstracts were received and reviewed by 113 reviewers.

The 4th IIMA Conference on Marketing in Emerging Economies was proclaimed as the most important event committed to offer a unique forum to present and converse research on marketing in the perspective of emerging economies. The event brought together researchers, academicians and practitioners for assisting them to share research based marketing knowledge and promote contributions through multi-disciplinary research-based plan. The conference also convened research papers from academicians and marketing professionals coming from across the world which could be empirical, theoretical or based on case studies. Further, the 4th IIMA Conference on Marketing in Emerging Economies focused on many relevant topics including: consumer behaviour, management of marketing offers, strategic marketing, e-commerce, marketing research, marketing communication, retailing, psychology and marketing, experimentation in marketing, strategies for harnessing the potential at the bottom of the pyramid, applied IO models on competition in marketing, pedagogy in marketing, etc.