Entrepreneurship and Innovation: A Recipe for Disruption and Success.
Companies succeed and prosper through innovation. And to remain in business, they need to continue to innovate and keep an eye for new innovations in their areas of business. Many companies that were market leaders at one point in time no longer exit because they were comfortable in what they were doing and paid little attention to new innovations that eventually disrupted them and put them out of business.
Many of the companies (e.g., eBay, Amazon, Facebook, Instagram) that we are familiar with today started as individual entrepreneurial endeavours that grew to become big businesses. However, innovation was at the heart of each one of them. For innovations to develop into successful businesses they need to be underpinned by entrepreneurial mindsets that value success and understand the implications of developing and growing a new business.
Economic growth is slowing in many countries that used to grow in the past at double digits annually. Jobs have become scarce and unemployment is on the rise. This is particularly evident in many developing countries. The call for entrepreneurship has become more urgent than at any time in the past. However, any entrepreneurial activity will not succeed if it is not based on some kind of innovation. Innovation does not have to be technological. Innovation could be a process, a new business idea or a business model. Indeed, history is full of examples of smart technological innovations that never made it to the market place. There seems to be a symbiotic relation between innovation and entrepreneurship; both need each other to disrupt and succeed.
Following its successful 1st Innovation Conference that was held in December 2017, A’Sharqiyah University is pleased to be holding its 2nd Innovation Conference on 11 December 2019. The theme of this conference is focussed on entrepreneurship and its importance for individuals and national and international economies. Entrepreneurship that is underpinned by innovation will have greater chances of success as evidenced by many examples of successful (and innovative) global enterprises that became household names.
This conference will be a perfect platform to share and disseminate research findings, knowledge and experience of academics and practitioners (in all areas of their specialisms) where the subject of entrepreneurship and innovation is the basis of their enquiry and interest. Submissions, whether based on a theoretical or applied research approach, will be welcome.
All subjects where innovation and entrepreneurship is of central concern may include any of the following (or related) areas:
Moe Nawaz was born in 1955 and has lived in Birmingham (UK) since the age of eight. He served a five-year apprenticeship in Electrical Engineering at the Birmingham and Handsworth Collage. He became an entrepreneur from the age of 21 and has never been employed by anyone since. Moe worked with James Caan and Lord Young with a government program aimed at helping and supporting new startups in Birmingham for 5 years running his Mastermind Group across the West Midlands, all voluntarily.
Moe built his reputation on turning around underperforming and failing businesses during 1980s and 1990s. Not all were successful! He made millions and lost millions in the process of buying failing businesses, but the knowledge he gained by working in the trenches is what makes him one of the most demanded corporate mentors in the UK..
He is the Strategic Advisor and Mentor to FTSE 100 (stock market listed companies) Leaders with his HQ in Mayfair London but still lives in Birmingham. His company provides a variety of educational workshops and leadership peer to peer mastermind group learning seminars to address the dangers of continuing to think and work linearly and how to adopt none linear thinking for leaders and top management in order to gain sustainable growth into the future.
Moe’s website: http://moenawaz.com
The conference will be held at A’Sharqiyah University’s state of the art new campus in Ibra. Ibra is the second largest city in the A’Sharqiyah Region of Oman. It is located about 150 km (1.5 hours) from Muscat and has a population estimated at 55,000 people. It is one of the oldest cities in the Sultanate and was once a centre of trade, religion, education and art.
A’Sharqiyah University is a private institution of higher education. The University started its operations in the fall of 2010, with students in three colleges, namely, Business Administration, Engineering and Applied Sciences. The University has witnessed continuing increases in its student population that currently exceeds 3000 students and has added two more colleges: College of Arts and humanities and College of law.
The College of Business Administration (the organizer of the conference) is the largest college at the University in terms of student numbers. It has four departments. These are Management, Accounting and Finance, Management Information Systems and Records and Archives.
Prof. Fouad B. Chedid (Vice Chancellor - A’Sharqiyah University, Oman)
College of Business Administration (A’Sharqiyah University)