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The paper covers strategic planning and strengths, weakness, opportunities and threats (SWOT) analysis.

This paper is applicable to undergraduate and graduate management students.

In November 2009, Mr Vaidya Raghwan, one of the founders of AquaChemie LLC was contemplating the company's expansion into Qatar. The recent financial crisis had affected the company's growth plans. He wondered if this was the right time to move forward. This case examines the decisions taken by AquaChemie LLC and strategic analysis undertaken in preparation of entering a new market.

This case is suitable for the introductory section of the strategic planning course. The case is intended to expose students to the process of developing a business plan. Students are expected to carry out an analysis of the SWOT of the business and identify possible options of expansion. Students are also expected to identity the additional information they require to evaluate the expansion options identified.

A teaching note is available on request.

All innovations launched in the market do not necessarily enjoy the returns they deserve. The purpose of the paper is to explore the role played by distribution and promotion in enhancing the value of an innovation in the customer's perception. The paper concludes with practical implications for managers in planning and controlling new product launches.

The literature surrounding successes and failures of new product launches are reviewed to evaluate the importance of distribution and promotion as capabilities critical for enhancing the value of an innovation from the perspective of the customer. Innovations are conceptualized according to the strength of the distribution and promotion capabilities that support the innovation. Suitable strategies to enhance the promotion and distribution capabilities supporting an innovation are proposed in order to enhance the competitive advantage of an innovation.

The paper has conceptualized the positioning of an innovation's value based on the strength of “market support” and “user mindspace position” capabilities supporting the innovation. Based on the position of an innovation's value, specific strategies to augment the distribution and promotion capabilities are identified for enhancing an innovation's value.

Innovations per se do not influence a positive evaluation by the consumer unless adequately supported by marketing efforts. A key implication of this paper is the need to focus attention on marketing efforts to enhance the value of an innovation in the consumer's evaluation process.

The paper provides the marketer a unique perspective to analyze an innovation's value from the customer's viewpoint based on the nature of marketing efforts employed.

The purpose of this paper is to test the determinants of foreign direct investment (FDI) into countries of the Middle East North Africa (MENA) region.

The research is based on an econometric model that includes factors that potentially drive FDI flows into countries in the MENA region.

Energy endowments have a negative impact on FDI flows into a country. GDP per capita, openness to trade and oil prices have a positive impact on FDI inflows, while aggregate measures of environmental risk are not a differentiating factor among countries in the region.

This paper demonstrates that the “Dutch disease” concept applies to FDI in resource rich countries in the MENA region. Countries with large amounts of oil and gas have are more likely to have policies and institutions that inhibit FDI. Countries that value the spillover effects from FDI need to reconsider legislative and institutional hurdles that remain.

Business, management and accounting (BMA) papers published from The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, account for less than 1 per cent of the total papers published. As nations in MENA try and compete on the national competitive index, there is a tendency to adopt performance appraisal criteria from more established research nations. MENA accounts for 6 per cent of world population, and has one of the world's highest growth rates at 3 per cent. Since over one‐third of the population is under 15, if factors that hider and encourage research are identified, the research output can be increased. As it is clear that research on this region and from researchers in MENA is low, the purpose of this paper is to focus on how to increase research on this region.

Since there is very little information from this region, the research was exploratory in nature. Interviews with academics, officers in charge or research grants, publishers and senior managers from industry using and conducting research were used as a basis to identify research barriers and methods to overcome barriers. This was triangulated with secondary data from existing academic research, industry and NGO reports and research seminars and discussions.

The barriers and strategies to overcome research can be classified into three categories based on key stakeholders: the government (or policy makers); the industry or market conditions; and the institutions. Strategies at the individual academic level are also identified, which may overcome more macro environmental limitations.

This paper is the first of its kind in this region that consolidates many aspects and helps new researchers manage and improve research productivity. The paper is of value to any researcher but especially to policy makers, academics, promotion boards and universities that have doctoral programs.

The failure of an entity is not necessarily an accounting and financial problem. It may include factors such as earnings management and personal values. The problem with managing earnings is it becomes an ethical practice, regardless of who is or may be affected by the practice or the information that flows from it. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to survey students and business managers to measure their perceptions about the morality of earnings management actions. Accounting educators should aim to assist students to understand how they may react once confronted with an ethical conflict when in practice.

This paper conducts a survey of undergraduate accounting students and business managers (MBA students) at a reputed international university. Undergraduate students, majoring in accounting and business managers were surveyed to measure their perception of specific earnings‐management actions. The questionnaire includes 20 items relating to ten earnings‐management practices. The respondents were required to rate each question on a five‐point scale ranging from 1, an ethical practice, to 5, totally unethical. The frequency distributions and the mean values were calculated, using a 0.05 difference in the mean values as significant. This paper uses a similar questionnaire as Giacomino and Akers. This questionnaire was originally used by Bruns and Merchant.

The evidence in this paper shows that there is no significant difference between the perceptions of business managers and students regarding the morality of earnings management. Furthermore, the survey indicated that more courses must be offered at universities to address such aspects of ethics and earnings management.

This paper indicates that business students need more exposure to and understanding of earnings management. There should be regular reports of fraudulent practices as a result of earnings management by the media and academic journals and greater emphasis should be placed in the accounting curricula on earnings management practices. However, difficult, it should be integrated into business courses or a separate business ethics course or an accounting course taught by accounting and ethics academia. Furthermore, Giacomino and Akers suggest that the “real‐world” aspects of earnings management practices be enhanced and that experienced business professionals become an integral part of accounting courses. By using experienced professionals during lectures and making discussions of earning more realistic, there is an expectation that the differences between students and business managers may be reduced.

The extant literature on leadership in the Arab world reflects the traditional bias of leadership being a male domain. Arising out of a patriarchal social structure, men assume leadership in organizations while women are often confined to work at home. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the emergence of women leaders in UAE organizations by going beyond biological sex role biases to identify leadership as masculine or feminine gendered role stereotypes in organizations.

The data collected over two periods comprised two sets of Schein Descriptive Index (SDI) together with those of leadership intention and behaviour style; correlations thereof were computed to test hypotheses constructed from the literature.

The findings indicate that within organizations in the UAE, employee feedback highlights gender‐role stereotypes as defining leadership roles, rather than individual biological sex and their traditional family and social role. The findings reveal that in the UAE, gender stereotypes influence leadership intention and behaviour rather than individual biological sex and related traditions. Accordingly, women leaders having higher proportions of “agentic” characteristics of male gender stereotype together with lower proportions of “people orientation” of female gender stereotype, which makes successful leaders in the UAE break the proverbial “glass ceiling”. This explains the emergence of an increasing number of women leaders in the UAE.

Generalizability of the findings is limited by non‐representation of countries with high gender egalitarianism, as well as the geographical limitation of the study to the UAE only. In the context of traditional male‐dominated organizations in the UAE, the findings on gender‐role stereotypes of leaders in these organizations cannot only help organizations take informed decisions in choosing leaders without the “glass ceiling” biases, but can go further to identify and nurture potential leaders, including women leaders, within organizations. These findings are of considerable significance to the Middle East and the Arab world in general, in the wake of the developments witnessed there.

The paper explains women leadership in organizations in the UAE, a part of the Arab world of the Middle East, from the perspective of gender‐role stereotypes, as opposed to traditional sex‐role biases, to bring women leaders there into the mainstream gender literature.

Business process implementation has been primarily seen as a redesign of the workflow with the consequent organizational change assumed to be taking place automatically or through a process of “muddling through”. Although evidence suggests that 70 per cent of business process reengineering programmes have failed due to lack of alignment with corporate change strategy, the question of alignment of workflow redesign with the organizational change process has not received adequate attention. The purpose of this paper is to provide a framework for managing organizational change in a structured manner during workflow redesign, a perspective missing in the literature on business process management (BPM) implementation.

This paper attempts to integrate the 8-S dimensions of Higgins model across the different phases of workflow redesign to develop a process framework of managing organizational change during BPM workflow redesign. As an exploratory study the paper draws on existing literature on BPM and change alignment to conceptualize an alignment framework of associated managerial activities involved during different phases of BPM workflow redesign. The framework is evaluated against two case studies of business process implementation to substantiate how lack of alignment leads to failure in BPM implementation.

The paper provides a conceptual framework of how organizational change should be managed during BPM implementation. The model suggests the sequence of alignment of the 8-S dimensions (Higgins, 2005) with the different phases of the workflow redesign and identifies the role of the managerial levels in the organization in managing the alignment of the 8-S dimensions during business process change.

This framework would provide managers with an execution template of how to achieve alignment of the workflow redesign with the 8-S dimensions thus facilitating effective organizational change during business process implementation.

This paper proposes a process model of how organizational elements should be aligned with the workflow redesign during business process change implementation. No such model is available in BPM literature proposing alignment between hard and soft factors.

The field of entrepreneurship has seen a dramatic increase in studies focusing on networks and relations. Research in this area has thus far focused on how the structure and quality of entrepreneurs' existing interpersonal ties shape information access and thereby influence entrepreneurial outcomes. The purpose of this paper is to extend the focus further by examining how the entrepreneur's socio‐demographic profile affects advisory network configuration in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) context.

In this paper, the authors used Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) data, at the individual level (total early‐stage entrepreneurial activities) in 14 countries within the MENA region over the course of three years (2009, 2010 and 2011). The sample of networks is obtained from the entrepreneurs identified among the adults interviewed in the adult population survey of GEM participating countries from the MENA region.

Strong evidence was found that socio‐demographic variables such as gender, age, income and education have an impact on the usage of advice‐seeking networks by entrepreneurs across MENA. For instance, the findings suggest that women entrepreneurs in the MENA region tend to rely more on personal networks compared to male entrepreneurs.

The paper's contribution is novel in providing empirical evidence exposing the interplay between socio‐demographic factors, new venture start‐up phases, to entrepreneurial networks. Prospective scholarly research need to improve our understanding about the effects of network evolution on the entrepreneurial trajectory, as well to develop a greater understanding on how, when and why MENA‐based entrepreneurial networks emerge, develop and change over time.