Smart Business Event on How MSMEs can tackle VUCA

Pandemic, global warming, Ukraine invasion, stock market ups and downs, etc. there are several factors that are affecting the economic climate of today. How can MSMEs trudge through these uncertainties? To answer this a panel discussion was conducted by Business Standard and the MCCI (The Madras Chamber) on May 20.
The Business Standard Smart Business event indicated that MSMEs should rather wait for the upside during the time of an economic upside, instead of batting for subsidies. Micro, small and medium enterprises in India should be open and ready to change in a time of volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) world in the current global situations. Talking about the changes in the mobility space through electric vehicles, the panel discussed that the role of the MSMEs is to create new markets in a world of disruptions. The panellists also batted for improvement of the communication process in an organisation, during the time of disruption. It added that the VUCA moment is part of every sector of life now including business, geopolitics, energy, wherever volatility and uncertainty exists. The panellists took the global pandemic situation and war as examples to look at how companies should look for a long-term strategy to tide over a crisis.
The topic of discussion was 'MSMEs in the VUCA world'. R. Raghuttama Rao, the chief executive officer of Gopalakrishnan Deshpande Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (GDC) at IIT Madras was the keynote speaker at the event. The other panellists included Hemalatha Annamalai, Founder and Former chief executive officer of Ampere Vehicles and Member of the Expert Committee for Revival of MSMEs, of the Tamil Nadu government; P Elango, Managing Director, Hindustan Oil Exploration Company and A.L. Ravindran, regional head and general manager, SIDBI in Chennai.