‘Collaborative initiative aims to further enhance entrepreneurship ecosystem’

‘The Collaborative’, an initiative to help researchers from academia, start-ups, and corporate work together towards the development of Bahrain, was launched yesterday.

The initiative was launched at the Second Digital Business Ecosystem Research Forum, which was organized by the University of Bahrain. It focused on researchers and practitioners, who explore information systems and digital entrepreneurship in the Kingdom and across the region.

On the sidelines of the event, the event’s chair, Dr. Noora Al Ghatem said: “The initiative was launched to create a common platform, where we can work together with the industry and public sector researchers while helping the entrepreneurs and the ecosystem. “It was launched because we saw that there was a need for us to work closely with industry and government. We came up with the idea for researchers from various sectors to come together in a platform and we defined the areas where we should work on together, whether it is by developing mutual studies or developing courses. “We even aim to include researchers from outside Bahrain who are experts in various fields,” she added.

The forum included keynote speeches, research presentations, thematic plenaries, and a stakeholder consultation roundtable. It discussed and elaborated on many themes such as the shaping of business ecosystems, implications of these ecosystems for global scaling of start-ups in the GCC, building collaborative capacity to support start-ups, and how to link research on the topic to practice.