Taking its lead from the recently launched UAE and Dubai Innovation Strategies, Strathclyde Business School UAE's latest Strathclyde Dialogues explored the current trends taking place in the UAE, and globally, within the exciting and dynamic arena of collaborative innovation.
The event, hosted on February 17 at In5 Innovation Hub in Dubai's Knowledge Village attracted a diverse audience from the local business, entrepreneurial and academic communities as well as from Strathclyde’s own MBA alumni network.
Following a lively networking session, the first of the invited panel speakers, Helen Sell, experience consultant and founder of Customer at Heart kicked off the Dialogues with a powerful account of collaborative creativity. Helen established Dubai as one of 200 cities worldwide that host the community-based 'Global Service Jams', where participants co-create through a series of rapid prototyping techniques. Arguing that modern organisations stifle rather than release creativity, she gave a convincing account of how the process and techniques used in these intense 48-hour events enable individuals and the group to overcome creative blocks and unlock innovative thinking.
The next speaker, Professor Sarah Dodd of the Hunter Centre for Entrepreneurship at Strathclyde Business School then put the case that genuinely collaborative innovation requires a new perspective on the ownership of resources and processes. Her overview of new process models was richly illustrated with examples from a range of industrial sectors, covering both innovative start-ups and big corporations, and also touched upon grassroots collaborative models that address societal and economic challenges.
Finally, Dr Nikolaos Mavridis from MIT and founder of IRML, the first Robotics and AI research lab in the GCC, discussed the growing innovation ecosystem in the UAE. With his focus on helping enable the Emirates to become a world-class innovation hub, Dr Mavridis drew on his long and multi-faceted experience to shed light on the UAE’s innovation ecosystem and performance, highlighting recent initiatives designed to foster and embed an innovative culture, and sharing his views on the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.
After the presentations, the event moved on to an extended question and answer discussion between the panel and the audience, followed by more informal networking.
Reflecting after the event, Strathclyde Dialogues host and SBS senior lecturer Dr Katerina Nicolopoulou commented, “The distinguished international experts who joined us for this Dialogue panel helped the audience gain a good understanding of both global practices as well as local realities, in terms of the tensions and paradoxes that lie behind the notion of collaboration for innovation.”
The next Strathclyde Dialogues will be held in May with details to be announced shortly. The Strathclyde Dialogues series is now in its fifth year with events held in Abu Dhabi and Dubai. The Dialogues bring together panels of experts who, by exchanging views and perspectives, promote the sharing of knowledge in various fields of contemporary interest globally, and with particular application to the UAE.
For more information about the Strathclyde Dialogue series, contact Dr Katerina Nicolopoulou.