INNOVATION OVERSEAS
The Growth and Rebirth of Entrepreneurship in the Arab World
By Joe Haslam T
alking to entrepreneurship students about strategy is like talking to millennials about pension plans, and it doesn’t
help that textbooks on strategy are on the whole quite dull affairs. The trick therefore is to talk about strategy by telling fast paced stories of people and places, without actually using the “S word” itself.
Texts by Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, Robert Greene and Carl von Clausewitz are all on hand if I needed but the one I always lead with is Twenty Seven Articles, a sort of “For Dummies” document written in 1917 by T.E. Lawrence as a guide for British officers to work effectively with Arab Bedouin. Cynics will immediately tut tut about how peaceful the Middle East has been ever since but it is the approach he took that is worth studying. Among the 92 nationalities in the MBA programme at IE Business School, Lawrence´s words always provoke what Mrs. Merton called a “lively debate” as to whether they are still relevant today. Those who still live in the MENA (Middle East & North Africa) region like to dismiss it but the immigrant children of Lebanese or Syrian parents, especially those who grew up in Columbia or Mexico, tend to argue that it is as accurate today as ever.
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It is worth mentioning Lebanon and the Lebanese diaspora in particular. The best known is Mexican magnate Carlos Slim, who appears in some lists as the richest man in the world, but other names include Carlos Ghosn of Renault Nissan and Nicolas Hayek co-founder of Swatch. When the Israeli influence on Silicon Valley is highlighted, some Arabs like to counter that Steve Jobs’ biological father was a Syrian and companies such as Cloudera, AdMob, Paypal, Google and Yahoo have all had people of Arab origin in senior executive roles. So while the Gulf region is currently dominated by income from hydrocarbons, there are role models which could be used to inspire innovation and entrepreneurship in parallel.
Arab Spring While most of the attention has been either on the fall of regimes in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt or the wars in Iraq and Syria, change has also come to countries such as Jordan, Kuwait and Morocco. Here, the rulers know that some amount of reform is necessary to placate a populous better informed than ever as a result of social media and mobile telephony. And as we have seen in many EU countries and
just before the recent US Presidential elections, entrepreneurs are suddenly all the rage, with Arab rulers now hosting entrepreneurship conferences or visiting university incubators. Familiar themes at these conferences include great innovations that the Arabs gave to the world such as medicine (surgical instruments) and banking (cheques).
These incubators and conferences don´t do any harm but there is a disconnection among organisers and many Arab entrepreneurs on the direction in which they want their country of origin to go. Broadly, they worry as much about the danger of extractive elites in power as they do about Islamic extremism. Their message is one of empowerment and
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