Through Perseverance and Frugality, a Path to Leadership in Egypt’s High-Tech Industry

She started out as a computer science major fascinated with technology. Today, Hanan Abdel Meguid oversees one of Cairo’s better-known online and mobile technology companies. Noting that the company now has offices around the world, Meguid tells Arabic Knowledge@Wharton how she bounced back from failure, how she approaches management, and what advice she would offer to would-be entrepreneurs. “Focus on what you really need to build,” she says.

Bites and Bytes: An Egyptian Entrepreneur’s Mix of Computers and Cookies

Egyptian entrepreneur Heidi Belal has two companies to her name: She works as a tech services provider and runs her own dessert catering business. In an interview with Arabic Knowledge@Wharton, Belal discusses how such a quirky combination of businesses came about, and what she has done to turn each business into a success. One nugget of advice: “Put the most minimal investment you can into the business, and then see how it goes from there.”

Read the full story: http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/arabic/article.cfm?articleid=2932

Wharton Professor: Businesses Must Bear Social Costs of Their Activities

Alcoholism on Indian reserves in the United States has been a chronic and devastating problem for the Native American community. According to a report last year by the Centers for Disease Control, Native Americans report more binge drinking episodes per month and higher alcohol consumption per episode than other races.

Now, one Native American tribe is suing leading beer companies for US$500 million for contributing to alcoholism rates in reserves. In an online debate of the merits of the tribe’s claims, Waheed Hussain, Wharton assistant professor of legal studies and business ethics, argues that “when companies are not paying the full social costs of their activities, they have a special responsibility to mitigate the damage that they do.”

If businesses make profits at an expense to all, it’s not the type of economic activity that lives up to the spirit of free commerce, Hussain adds. “Businesses don’t always pay the full social cost. A manufacturer might cause pollution but not pay to clean it up. A bank might create financial risks, but leave the fallout to the rest of us. When businesses do not pay the full social cost, their activities might actually detract from social prosperity rather than contribute to it.”

Read his full argument here: http://nyti.ms/Mo6Jyl

Wharton and HCT Host First Innovation Tournament in the Middle East

A group of 12 semi-finalists from around the Middle East and Asia competed in the region’s first innovation tournament, hosted by the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and the United Arab Emirates’ Higher Colleges of Technology in Abu Dhabi. With a focus on sustainable concepts that can be implemented globally, the competing ideas ranged from new building technologies to water-saving systems. Over two days in May, the group vied to win the top prize from a total of US$30,000, but they also compared observations about the challenges facing regional innovators.

Read about the competition here: http://bit.ly/JErHFO

Christine Lagarde: Emerging Market Nations Will Get More Power in the IMF

Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), sees no alternative to the strict austerity policies being imposed on many peripheral European countries, says the double dip recessions in Italy and Ireland just announced come as no surprise, and notes that IMF reforms will shift 6% of current quotas to dynamic emerging and developing countries. Lagarde’s comments came in an exclusive interview with Knowledge@Wharton and media partner ParisTech Review.

Read the full story here: http://bit.ly/HWE788

Booz & Company’s Joe Saddi: The Arab Spring Toppled Governments, but High Unemployment Remains the Region’s Biggest Concern

Now a year beyond the first flush of the Arab Spring movements throughout Northern Africa and other parts of the Middle East, the difficulties of economic uplift in the area are becoming apparent. In a way, the sudden successes of the uprisings, particularly in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, mask the real long-term difficulties of laying the foundations for sustained economic viability for the region.

Joe Saddi, the chairman of Booz & Company, has long done business in the region and spoke about both the Arab Spring’s upsides and downsides at the first Wharton Middle East North Africa (MENA) business conference recently.

“I hear often the phrase, ‘The Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity’,” said Saddi. “But now that the opportunity to have an economic success is there, we can no longer afford to do that.”

Read the full story here: http://bit.ly/H9VmIn

Despite Wealthy Appearances, the Middle East’s Oil and Gas Exporters Worry about the Future of Energy

One of the great lamentations of the Western world is that its economy is being held hostage to Middle Eastern oligarchies, that the nations of the Middle East and North Africa are becoming richer and richer from monies the United States and the rest of the developed world lay at their feet.

Yet at a recent panel at the first Wharton Middle East and North Africa Business Conference, experts who have spent years looking at the oil industry, often first hand from those oil countries themselves, painted a different picture. It is one of worry about the future of oil, and a move in many places toward not only different industries, but completely different kinds of energy production.

“The challenges in the Middle East transcend oil,” said Morten Klumb, a partner at McKinsey & Company, who has spent the last six years for the firm in the Middle East, often focusing on infrastructure and real estate, not solely the oil business. The World Bank, said Klumb, estimates that the region has to spend billions of dollars on infrastructure just to get up to speed.

Read the full story here: http://bit.ly/Hd8qtD

An Emirati Research Pioneer Balances Business Success and Family Demands

When Maha Al-Farhan first applied for permits to start her clinical research firm in the United Arab Emirates, government officials didn’t even have a category to classify her business.

As a pioneer in clinical research in the Middle East, ClinArt International‘s founder  has plenty of advice for Arab female entrepreneurs, especially for Emirati women, who she says aren’t taking full advantage of the business opportunities available to them.

Al-Farhan speaks to Arabic Knowledge@Wharton about building a successful company, and balancing that with her personal duties as a wife and mother.

“My competitors starting doing the same a few years later which is a pleasure to me because it means we have a higher caliber of talent in the region and that’s what we need. So it’s a process, everyday you have to do something new. You have to evolve and as long as you concentrate and focus, you’ll be evolving all the time.”

Read the full interview here: http://t.co/VyiCeExc

Mobile Marketing: Location Matters — But How Much?

Mobile technology has presented marketers with a new and entirely unique opportunity, says Martin Spann. It could be a hugely lucrative opportunity, too.

“The smartphone is a location-based service,” notes Spann, a professor of electronic commerce at Ludwig-Maximilians University (LMU) in Munich. “And that means you can integrate the online world with the offline world.”

In other words, says Spann, smartphones have done more than just allow users to remain fully engaged with the virtual world while out and about in the real world. They’ve also allowed companies to reach those users at pretty much any time of the day, no matter where they are. As a result, “location-based” marketing campaigns have become increasingly common, and recently, Spann set out to discover just how profitable those campaigns can be.

Read more: http://t.co/O206iQwC

Apply Now to the Wharton Innovation Contest, Chance to Win 100,000 AED in Prizes

Are you an innovator, ideas pioneer or trailblazer in your chosen field? Do you—or could you—have an idea for a solution that can be implemented in businesses worldwide?

If so, you have the opportunity, as an individual or as part of a team, to participate in a global contest; obtain publicity for your solution; be mentored by local and international business experts and win prizes.

The Higher Colleges of Technology, the largest higher education institution in the United Arab Emirates, and Knowledge@Wharton, the online research and business analysis journal of the Wharton School of The University of Pennsylvania, have teamed up to conduct an “Innovation Tournament“ specifically designed for the MENA region.

Inspired by the book Innovation Tournaments by Wharton professors Christian Terwiesch and Karl Ulrich, this tournament will require participants to create solutions by which society can implement new and sustainable technologies as well as customer-centric work processes. The tournament is open to all individuals and/or groups from around the world who wish to submit a solution for consideration.

The deadline for submissions to the Innovation Tournament 2021 is 5pm April 5, 2012 (UAE time).  To enter, go here: http://wharton.hct.ac.ae/innovation-tournament-2021/enter/