Entrepreneurial Rise in the Middle East and North Africa: The Influence of Quadruple Helix on Technological Innovation

Purpose: Economic development agendas usually drive innovation, and it is an essential tool for government institutions to promote economic growth. The Quadruple Helix Model of Innovation captures the process by integrating and overlapping knowledge and technology, forming an aggregate output invested in producing more products and services, innovation, and technology. This chapter focuses on how the quadruple helix supports the linkage between knowledge creation, innovation output, and enhancing regional and national competitiveness.

Design/methodology/approach: The chapter also illustrates the triple helix concept and then the quadruple helix model of innovation, focusing on the four main aspects, i.e., Government, Universities, Industry, and Civil society. The authors aim to simulate the economic significance of evolving, rapidly adaptive, and interdisciplinary knowledge and innovation ecosystems.

Findings: The findings and examples stated in several different MENA regions can boost the economy as various platforms provide digital transformation, encourage culture awareness in schools, encourage youth empowerment, and support tech start-ups. They can drive forward the index of creativity and innovation within entrepreneurs and the general members of society. Recommendations include a further study to modify the model and customize it based on the country’s needs.

Originality/value: This chapter of the book focuses on the four main aspects of the quadruple helix model of innovation with specific examples in several countries. The chapter would be beneficial for the upcoming entrepreneurs and students who progress in developing tech start-ups and digitization.

This chapter draws its findings from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) data set for 2016 to 2019 to provide a comprehensive albeit concise overview of the evolution of entrepreneurship activities in Qatar.

The results indicate that Qatar experienced an increase in the entrepreneurship activities with a significant percentage of adults starting or running new businesses. Data also revealed that, despite an equal proportion of women and men involved in early-stage entrepreneurial activities, women experience a lower transformation rate into established business ownership. In addition, to the gender gap, this study revealed that transforming new businesses into established business ownership is one of the main challenge to be addressed to develop the impact of entrepreneurship in the country further. Finally, the chapter shows that Qatar has created an entrepreneurial ecosystem of very high quality as demonstrated by its third place in the National Entrepreneurship Context Index and by having secured the first place in the MENA region.

This chapter concludes by outlining a number of recommendations for policymakers to further foster the entrepreneurial activities in Qatar especially among the younger population.

Purpose: The chapter explains how entrepreneurship can generate either subsistence, destructive, or peace-positive outcomes in the conflict zones of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Institutional arrangements are examined for how they can advance the latter.

Methodology/approach: Literatures from conflict resolution, development, economics, corporate social responsibility, entrepreneurship, and psychology are drawn on to frame the multiple roles of entrepreneurs in conflict zones, and understand the institutional arrangements that support peace-positive entrepreneurship.

Findings: The chapter indicates that formalization plays a major role in promoting peace-positive entrepreneurship while deterring destructive entrepreneurship. Conflict zone institutional arrangements that reestablish trust, can uphold the rule of law, and incentivize entrepreneurial activity aid in the formalization process. Special attention is paid to the inclusive nature of these activities, with the need to heal religious, tribal, and sectarian divides in the region, and promote the inclusion of all societal actors (namely, minorities and women) to engage in enterprising activities.

Social implications: The chapter outlines the importance for both foreign donors and local actors to understand the determinant role of institutions in conflict zone entrepreneurial ecosystems, promoting the role of institutional reform over and above the micro-level activity currently grabbing attention in the region.

Originality/value of the chapter: The chapter contrasts the singular narrative often presented on the positive role of conflict zone entrepreneurship in the informal sector, offering a paradoxical view on the topic, and arguing for formalization and institutional reform to remain aspirational among researchers and practitioners who commonly accept and promote the role of the informal sector in conflict zones.

Purpose: The prominence of entrepreneurial marketing (EM) as the practice of exploiting market opportunities is becoming increasingly important to Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). It has been stated that SMEs lack resources such as finance, knowledge, experience, and information, compared with larger firms that integrate marketing with innovativeness, which is critical to enhancing entrepreneurship. Therefore, this chapter aims at establishing the theoretical foundation that links entrepreneurial orientation with marketing practices in Jordanian SMEs. More specifically, this chapter provides deep recognition of the current status of EM opportunities and challenges in Jordanian SMEs.

Design/methodology/approach: As SMEs are one of the important components in the private sector in Jordan and contribute to the creation of almost half of the GDP. Accordingly, this chapter adopts a critical review of the relevant literature, governmental reports, business studies, and published surveys in EM among Jordanian SMEs. Moreover, this chapter will present a thorough analysis of the published statistics and insights about EM orientations from different sectors of Jordanian SMEs. Based on the reviewed and analyzed secondary data, EM initiatives, opportunities, and challenges can be extracted and highlighted to achieve the purpose of this chapter.

Findings: The expected outcomes of the chapter are to build the theoretical foundation and promote a deep understanding that bridges the knowledge gap about the status of EM in Jordanian SMEs supported by literature and published report evidence. Another outcome of this chapter is highlighting the important entrepreneurial issues and identifying areas for further research in the Middle East generally and Jordan particularly.

Practical implications: The chapter provides relevant knowledge, literature-based evidence, and lessons learned to empower entrepreneurs in SMEs. This chapter also enhances the best practices of EM for entrepreneurs, marketers, and policymakers. Moreover, this chapter proposes how to overcome potential challenges and threats that may be encountered by practitioners, especially in different cultural contexts such as the Middle East and North African (MENA) region.

Originality/value: The chapter proposed a conceptual foundation about EM in SMEs aimed at different cultural contexts like Jordan. Moreover, the chapter provides a critical review of published research that explains entrepreneurs aspirations for growth, expansion, and innovation, which is critical for the growth and sustainability of SMEs. Finally, the chapter concludes by providing policy implications and practical recommendations that can encourage policymakers in formulating and implementing the relevant interventions and strategic trends for enhancing entrepreneurship in Jordan.

Purpose: The best way of improving youth entrepreneurs’ success rates is to provide youth entrepreneurs with quality support, skills, and resources to be better equipped and willing to make any decision that makes them creative with time. This chapter explores youth entrepreneurship in the MENA region as educating young people about entrepreneurship is crucial today and is about developing new businesses in the region.

Design/methodology/approach: The chapter mainly aims at the role of academia in boosting entrepreneurship among young people in the UAE. Then the literature provides insights on the substantial gender effect on becoming an entrepreneur and the region’s job market.

Findings: Our research indicates that the global economy is witnessing a sudden rise in entrepreneurship in all life areas, based on current world dynamics. Thus, young people must learn and accomplish skills that promote creativity for doing business. For young people to have the requisite skills to start their businesses, educational programs must be in line with industry requirements.

Originality/value: This chapter of the book focuses on youth entrepreneurship, which would help upcoming researchers and students grasp good knowledge about entrepreneurship’s importance. It also recommends relevant research areas on MENA youth entrepreneurship support programs.

Purpose: The chapter aims to discuss the importance of economic development tourism in the United Arab Emirates and the role of entrepreneurship in financial growth, as it is an important aspect in the business environment of tourism. Having said that, the UAE has made remarkable progress in sustaining its economic growth and tourism development over the past decades.

Methodology: To review the importance of the economic development tourism in the United Arab Emirates and the role of entrepreneurship in financial growth, the authors have explored journals from the Scopus, Science direct, Google scholar, and EBSCOHost databases. Furthermore, the Latest reports from UNO and UAE are also examined to find the tourism statistics of past years.

Findings: This study explored the contribution of the tourism industry in enhancing the economic development of the country. This chapter highlighted the past and current trends in tourism in the UAE. Entrepreneurship is considered to be one of the major important outcomes of increased tourism in the country. UAE has also focused on every subject linked to tourism. Furthermore, the country has noted entrepreneurship as a driving factor for tourism. Therefore, various steps have been taken to encourage tourism and entrepreneurship, such as developing infrastructure, along with the implementation of tourism and entrepreneurial education.

Limitations: Like other research studies, this study also has some limitations. The latest reports available were of 2017 to 2019; therefore, current year trends are not explored extensively. Also, due to the scarcity of literature on entrepreneurial tourism in the UAE, this study has reviewed limited articles from UAE.

Social Implications: A more “integrative destination-marketing” process should be promoted with a concerted focus on social identity, cultural sustainability, and religiosity. The overall objective would, therefore, be to develop positive perceptions of destinations such as Dubai that are consistent with its Islamic roots, indigenous peoples, and social and cultural bases.

Originality: To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this chapter is one of its own kind. There are no similar studies have been conducted in the context of the UAE. This study has opened the gates for future research in the tourism sector in UAE.

Purpose: This study examines the use of Design Thinking by international development actors in the Middle East & North Africa (MENA) region. Factors contributing to Design Thinking’s adoption, its evolution, and contributions to the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are identified.

Methodology/approach: The study used a desk review, survey questionnaire, and semi-structured interviews with purposefully selected experts to capture experiences from across the MENA region. Snowballing enabled more experts to be reached.

Findings: Over the past decade, Design Thinking has been successfully adopted by a growing number of organizations and sectors. Its low-resource requirements and focus on mindset enable it to empower communities to find solutions by and for themselves. Its human-centered approach, use of empathy to deepen understanding of the user makes it well suited for advancing the 2030 SDGs vision of “no one left behind.”

Research limitations/implications: This was a small exploratory study that involved 13 respondents in 4 countries. All experts interviewed lead Design Thinking projects across the MENA region. The chapter identifies actions to enhance research/knowledge in this area.

Practical implications: A systematic mapping of Design Thinking actors and initiatives across the MENA region and the establishment of communities of practice could improve knowledge and resource sharing and more effective/wider application of Design Thinking.

Social implications: Design Thinking can contribute to the 2030 SDGs in the MENA region. As a low-resource methodology, Design Thinking can empower grassroots actors to make and own needed changes.

Originality/value of paper: This chapter appears to be the first one to examine Design Thinking’s contribution to achieving the 2030 SDGs in the MENA region.

Purpose: The world has been impacted distinctively by the Covid-19 outbreak. The economic recession in 2020 and 2021 is predicted to become the most intense since World War II. This chapter explores the effects of the Covid-19 epidemic crisis on entrepreneurship and different activities, emphasizing developing economies.

Design/methodology/approach: The work aims first on the major crises that could impact entrepreneurial activity triggered by the pandemic. The authors briefly study the literature on the previous health crisis and its impacts on entrepreneurship. Then, under Covid-19, the authors illustrated the navigational prospects for creativity and entrepreneurship.

Findings: Our research indicates that the pandemic’s impact on creativity and entrepreneurship would be adverse but not hugely harmful. A new opportunity ecosystem under COVID-19 is respected and researched for innovation and entrepreneurship. Simultaneously, the incentives provided by the COVID-19 pandemic for consumer e-commerce adoption in Saudi Arabia are being addressed.

Originality/value: This is probably the first chapter of the book focusing on the impact on the Covid-19 pandemic entrepreneurship. It directly discusses the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on both the global economy and entrepreneurship dynamics. It also recommends fascinating future-oriented, relevant research areas about helping entrepreneurs solve it and what new prospects are developing for them.

Purpose: The purpose of this chapter is to explore different aspects of FinTech, including its evolution, its impact on the Financial Services industry, its relationship with Islamic Finance and its role in sustainable development, plus understanding its current status in the UAE.

Design/methodology/approach: Using the existing literature, books, website articles, and online news to explore and address various aspects of FinTech and incorporating the acquired knowledge to illustrate the UAE’s initiatives and efforts in adopting and promoting FinTech.

Findings: FinTech is the marriage of Finance and Technology, which has existed a long time ago. Hence, the future calls for collaboration between FinTech leaders and traditional financial institutions to ensure global financial growth. Moreover, FinTech can accelerate the development of Islamic Finance through its powerful tools that can be Sharia compatible, and it can lead to a better sustainable future via empowering and enabling Green Finance. Using this acquired knowledge, the chapter illustrates that the UAE has become a global and regional FinTech hub as it contributes profoundly to the empowerment of FinTech via providing the ideal ecosystem for FinTech initiatives to thrive, which has been witnessed to be extremely powerful, especially during challenging times like the Covid-19 pandemic.

Research limitations/implications: Future research that would tackle different aspects of FinTech in the UAE can use this chapter as a guide toward acknowledging the imperative and the role of FinTech in facilitating financial transactions and perhaps explore ways by which FinTech can be used for wealth protection by paying deeper attention to RegTech and Cybersecurity.

Originality/value: This chapter contributes as an introductory guide to different aspects of FinTech that are relevant to MENA countries and using this knowledge to illustrate the status of FinTech in the UAE.

Purpose: This study aims to investigate the effect of culture on innovation within the workplace. Special attention has been paid to Middle East and North Africa (MENA) culture features and their impact on employees’ adaptation to the innovation within their organizations.

Approach/methodology: To achieve this objective, a theoretical study has been carried out. Given its popularity in culture-related research, the Hofstede model has been used to understand the specificities of MENA region culture. An extensive literature review has been employed to investigate the relationship between culture and innovation in the workplace.

Findings: Based on the relevant literature, it can be said that the country’s culture has a considerable impact on how the employees adapt to the changes within the workplace. Some issues of Arab culture that managers should be aware of and suitable solutions have been underlined to improve the adoption of innovation within the organizations in Arab countries.

Research implications: This study contributes to knowledge regarding the association between innovation and culture within the workplace in the MENA region. Findings provide straightforward ways for managers to improve the adaptation of their employees to the growing innovation required by the global market.

Originality/value: This study is among the earliest to focus on the association between innovation and culture within the MENA region. In addition, it is among the rare studies, which explore the main issues of Arab culture that make the adaptation to innovation a complex phenomenon that requires further efforts from managers for successful innovation performance. The limitations, as well as the future research pathways, have been mentioned at the end of this study.

Purpose: Culture is not only shared, and it is often interpreted and expressed over time. Also, culture may lead to the promotion of creativity and innovation within a specific region and motivate individuals or groups to cultivate an entrepreneurial spirit. This chapter explores how companies can apply cultural influences differently and how governments/higher offices encourage cultural influences in innovation.

Design/methodology/approach: The chapter mainly aims at the technology trends in infrastructure and innovation in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. The chapter aims to demonstrate how culture is shaped by innovation in education, patterns, and how the education system has developed, benefiting upcoming entrepreneurs in regions like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain.

Findings: This chapter examines the cultural history of various cultures, improving and promoting economic innovation and competitiveness. Thus, innovation involves new product creation, whereas innovation involves using the existing application with a creative approach to address the problems. Innovation and entrepreneurship are interlinked and dependent on each other, which considers aspects like practices, tasks, and responsibilities.

Originality/value: This chapter of the book focuses on culture and innovation mainly, which affects technological trends and entrepreneurship. Also, the chapter would be beneficial for the educational department that progresses in development and encourages students toward creativity.

Purpose: Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries demonstrate outstanding potential for innovative entrepreneurship due to the undiversified economy it has. The chapter unravels knowledge management’s scope to convert the MENA into a knowledge economy while ensuring sustainable development. Knowledge management through digitalization, big data analytics, and other technology-enabled practices could be embraced through various knowledge clusters and innovation networks.

Design/methodology/approach: The chapter proposes a conceptual model based on the quadruple helix model of innovation and associated knowledge and innovation networks operating together through a technology-enabled knowledge management process. MENA’s current status and expected performance are analyzed based on the given model.

Findings: An emergent need to digitalize the institutional operations, and knowledge flow from the four helices of innovation is realized. To ensure economic sustainability, MENA countries need to work on political stability, transparency, and accountability to ensure the flow of reliable knowledge in the knowledge management process. Building human competencies and skills is still a challenge for many MENA countries. Hence, education institutes need to introduce academic programs that are compatible with the labor requirement of the area. Since the region has a youth population in large proportion, human capital formation can bypass the over-population and unemployment challenge and instead become a competitive advantage.

Originality/value: The given chapter explores the knowledge management process, capabilities, benefits, competencies from the perspective of sustainable growth in MENA countries. It also recommends extensive data operations and analytics to enhance the knowledge-based economy.

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) has a comprehensive and coherent innovation system producing significant outcomes. However, as with every system, continuous improvement is required to optimize system performance. This chapter analyzes KSA’s innovation system based on the 2018 Global Innovation Index indicators among 127 countries. The chapter identifies the highlighted performance areas of the system and its market failures. In turn, the systemic analysis of the country’s NIS reveals the strong interactions but also the system’s failures, proposing a set of action policies to be undertaken that will generate a significant improvement over the expected results of the system. The main system failures identified are the low knowledge diffusion or knowledge spillover effects and the minimal access to equity funding for startups, or the absence of a risk capital culture. However, the country’s innovation system is coherent, presenting strong interaction linkages between the research, innovation, and commercialization node. It presents a remarkable improvement since 2011, presenting an above-average performance in terms of allocated resources for research and innovation.