This two-day conference, organized by Geoff Jones and Tarun Khanna, will focus on the intersection of oral history, business, and the Global South, offering a unique space for interdisciplinary discussions. The goal is to bring together a community of scholars who have utilized unconventional materials including the Creating Emerging Markets database to enhance their research and teaching on management and business leadership in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East.

With 183 interviews conducted to date, the HBS Creating Emerging Markets project (based at the Business History Initiative) has sought to transform research and course development on the history of business in the Global South, where major gaps persist in available and accessible knowledge about the business sector. By making interview transcripts and video clips freely accessible online, the project has used oral history to expand the knowledge base while encouraging methodological innovation in the use of digital data for both scholarly research and the classroom. Take a look at the freely accessible interview database here.

With sessions on research/teaching methodologies, regional perspectives on oral history and more, the conference hopes to encourage a dialogue that will serve as the platform for future trajectories of the Creating Emerging Markets project.