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Question: What conditions are required to catalyze and scale entrepreneurship in the region?
Habib Haddad: One of the region's top priorities for the years to come would be
job creation and we have been hearing those numbers for years now;
now it's time to act.
Seventy-five million jobs have to be created by 2020 and that's a 43% jump over
what we have today.
Just to put it into perspective the US in its best eight years did 20% jump and we
need to be twice as good.
We have a very young population, more than half of it is under 25, and it's very
entrepreneurial, energetic, and vibrant and that has proven so in the recent Arab spring.
How can we take this youth and this skill set into creating jobs and into starting
companies is going to be our role for the years to come, couple that with the wealth
of the governments in the Gulf countries and with the budget surplus there then we
start seeing a winning formula.
However, the role now is how can we put the right channels, how we can activate
the ecosystem so that those youth can take advantage of and move forward.
And we need to focus on foreign enablers, person enablers, and that's mainly education
could be qualified on mentorship programs, on education in high school and universities.
And then we have the financial enablers which goes all the way down from micro
finance to private equity and angel investment and venture capital.
And I think here one of the missing pieces is the missing middle.
The angel investment community is still weak and we need to push more wealthy
individuals to start being pro-active with entrepreneurs.
Then we have the business enablers - those are qualified by the elements that
are hyper local in a particular geographical area defined by business
incubators, by accelerators, by network associations and others that can give the
entrepreneurs this element of serendipity as they interact in the local environment.
Perhaps one of the biggest obstacles is the regulatory framework.
As companies start to grow from being a startup idea to an SME,
regulatory frameworks are becoming a big obstacle and those are opening a company, liquidating
a company, even issuing visas across border operations - all of those needs to be
fixed and the government here should be very pro-active in doing so.
And part of the environment enablers is also how can we push the culture into
accepting more failure.
And it's not a cultural issue because a cultural issue is really tough to fix;
however here, with the help of education and specifically the help of media and the
press we can push that.
The media should be more pro-active in covering innovation rather than covering politics.
We should put more spotlight on the entrepreneurs, we should put more
spotlight on stories of how entrepreneurs were able to go the next level.
And this is how we can push an ecosystem and a whole society in becoming more entrepreneurial.
Question: How can East Asia's economic yields from science and technology be replicated in the Arab world?
Habib Haddad: Perhaps the sector that would create jobs the fastest will be the
high tech one.
It's really a combination of new technologies, the increased demands from
users for applications but most importantly it's the low cost of entry for
entrepreneurs to come in, create products, create companies, and the next wave of jobs.
So if we look at the US, for example, that industry created four times jobs more
than the national average so it's really the fastest and cheapest way for job creation.
The other asset that the Arab world has and has to leverage is the link back from
the Arab world to its expert community.
If we look at Taiwan it is one of those countries, one of those case studies that
was able to leverage this link very well. And this is what we need to do in the
Arab world, we need to get back that knowledge from the expert community,
both as knowledge and ideally as also financial transfer so that we can encourage
and move our next wave of tech entrepreneurs as they're building their startups
and creating new waves of jobs.