Smith’s CSVC Hosts Global Gathering of Leaders to Address Grand Challenges

Industry leaders and academics from around the world gathered in Van Munching Hall recently to exchange insights into individuals and organizations creating value in their communities.

The event – Creating Value Alliances 6th Global Conference on Creating Value – was hosted Oct. 19-21, 2023, by the Center for Social Value Creation (CSVC) at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business.

“Though the ‘creating value’ topic seems pretty surface level, it is extremely complicated with many different schools of thought,” says CSVC Event Planner Ayman Bootwala.

He points to the conference’s keynote presenters’ ranging expertise, including Smith’s Roland Rust, Distinguished University Professor and David Bruce Smith Chair in Marketing. Rust related industrial and societal challenges – evolving and looming – to his recent book co-authored with Ming-Hui Huang “The Feeling Economy: How Artificial Intelligence Is Creating the Era of Empathy.”

Keynote insights, in addition to Rust’s, were shared by Phil Kotler and V. Kumar. Kotler is widely recognized as the “father of modern marketing” and for his book “Marketing Management” as most-widely used in marketing courses around the world. Kumar, former Editor of the Journal of Marketing, currently teaches at St. John’s University, with expertise in AI in marketing and developing models and methodologies to forecast sales and market share.

“Collaborating with Creating Value Alliance and hosting this conference illustrates Smith’s focus on academic research and tackling the grand challenges of our time,” says Nima Farshchi, CSVC director and executive director of the Office of Experiential Learning for Smith. “Having top academics, like Roland Rust, share their work in the area of value creation, through this event, further shows the phenomenal work that’s occurring here in Van Munching Hall.”

Other featured speakers ranged from Valutus CEO and founder Daniel Aronson and former Amazon Global VP for Customer Value Bill Price to Let’s Grow Leaders CEO Karin Hurt.

The conference was co-organized with Creating Value Alliance founder Gautum Mahajan (Journal of Creating Value founder and editor), who describes the organization as “an international movement to increase our understanding of the concept of value and, moreover, to find and promote ways of creating value consciously and more abundantly (and destroy less value).”

Farshchi adds, “Smith, through the CSVC, has engaged with the Creating Value Alliance since 2021, when we virtually chaired its America's Day event. The organization gave us a fantastic opportunity to host this year’s conference on creating value, in person, and we were honored to do so.”

Read more about Smith’s Center for Social Value Creation.