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Ecosystem
↑ Darwazah Center for Innovation Management and Entrepreneurship has partnered with Stichting SPARK to offer a program that helps to scale up late-stage startups.
Enabling Growth Here’s how a new collaborative project aims to support startups in Lebanon and the Middle East by DR. BIJAN AZAD
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ecent data from the World Bank found that only 15% of late-stage startups and small- to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) on a global scale have the capacity to innovate and grow beyond their immediate market. This is because these enterprises have a skills gap creating challenges in crucial areas such as strategy, human resource management, finance, marketing, sales tactics, negotiation, and effective product design and
management. Additionally, small firms frequently struggle to secure vital bank loans or investments in contrast with larger more established businesses. What complicates life for them is that access to finance is often dependent on making the above improvements. Before the financial crisis of 2019 and the COVID-19 pandemic that came after, Lebanese startups had been thriving. They were known to have presented groundbreaking innovations across every aspect of business.
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Unfortunately, only a few of these startups have survived the pandemic as well as the economic meltdown, and they now need to drastically improve their management capacity in order to continue innovating and scaling up their ventures. With these challenges in mind, the American University of Beirut’s (AUB) Suliman S. Olayan School of Business (OSB) is helping to support these Middle Eastern startups with a new initiative.
} The OSB’s Darwazah Center for Innovation Management and Entrepreneurship has partnered with Stichting SPARK, a leading Netherland-based youth-oriented economic development international non-governmental organization (NGO), to offer a program that helps to scale up late-stage startups. Together, these entities have created the AUB-SPARK Scaling-Up of Startups Program (SSS). A pillar of our past work at the Darwazah Center has been to intimately understand and solve the scaling-up pains of late-stage startups.