[img_inline align=”right” src=”http://padnws01.mcmaster.ca/images/Hassanein_Khaled.jpg” caption=”Khaled Hassanein, director of MeRC. File photo.”]The McMaster eBusiness Research Center (MeRC) in the DeGroote School of Business recently hosted two international conferences: the sixth annual International Conference on Mobile Business (ICMB) held July 9 to 11 and the eighth World Congress on the Management of eBusiness held July 11 to 13.

The conferences each provide a unique forum for dialogue and discussion among researchers and practitioners, which is a key element of MeRC's vision. While the ICMB focused on ongoing developments in the field of mobile and wireless technologies, applications and markets, the World Congress focused on strategies, practices and methods to leverage online technologies to facilitate new services, products and business development.

ICMB is the leading worldwide scholarly event in the area of mobile business and brings together academics, practitioners and policy makers. The theme of this year's conference was “Harnessing the potential for m-business,” focusing on major trends and challenges in the domain of mobile business.

A new feature of this year's conference was the designation of the first day as “Industry-Academia Brokerage Day,” which facilitated innovative discussion of both theory and practice, as well as encouraged collaborative research on the future of mobile business.

Twenty-two countries were represented among the academic and industry papers submitted, with a notable increase in submissions from Asia. Overall, 64 papers were presented at the academic and industry sessions, in addition to several panel discussions taking place throughout the conference.

At the World Congress, the conference program included six tracks: Business-to-Business, Business-to-Consumer, Human Computer Interaction, eHealth, Privacy & Security and eBusiness Case Studies. These tracks encouraged the discussion and review of recent, ground-breaking research results on the deployment and use of information technologies and services for eBusiness.

The conference featured four panels and three industry sessions, with 27 full research papers and 16 posters/short papers accepted, and five doctoral consortium proposals presented.

Delegates for both conferences came from around the globe, including North America, Europe, Australia, China and the Middle East. Both conferences boasted an outstanding group of keynote speakers, representing a vital cross-section of government, business and academia.

The organizing committee for both events consisted of faculty members of the information systems area of the DeGroote School of Business. For the World Congress, the committee consisted of Khaled Hassanein, Milena Head and Brian Detlor. The organizing committee for the ICMB was Yufei Yuan, Khaled Hassanein and Norm Archer. Christian Couturier and Greg Sprague, both with the Institute of Information Technology at the National Research Council, served as industry co-chairs.

Next year, MeRC will host the ninth World Congress on the Management of eBusiness in Ottawa in collaboration with the Sprott School of Business at Carleton University. The seventh International Conference on Mobile Business, with the theme of “Creativity and Convergence”, will be held July 7 and 8, 2008 in Barcelona, Spain.