Habib Haddad

Localization: imitation or art ?

When the Chinese internet giant QQ released Fanfou a few years ago many criticized it as an obvious clone to twitter. The same again happened with the launch of Watwet the Jordanian startup. After all, at first glance the sites do look a lot like twitter. Maktoob, the company behind the Arab internet success story was always described as the Yahoo of the Middle East because of the very similar services it provided. It didn’t come much of a surprise when Yahoo actually acquired the company in 2009.

But is localizing an existing product or business idea imitation or art, and does that limit innovation or actually requires it?

Governments on “lowering the cost of failure”

I participated yesterday in the Economist Roundtable in Beirut. The theme was around “how Lebanon can reach its full potential” and mostly focused on the role of government. There were some impressive talks by various Ministers including Charbel Nahas, Gebran Bassil and Mohammad Safadi. My panel discussed how to foster and keep Lebanese talent in the country, obviously I vouched for innovation and entrepreneurship especially among the youth.

I won’t try to be comprehensive in this post on what I think governments should do in general to foster innovation and entrepreneurship but I would like instead to talk about their roles on what Joi Ito a great friend and mentor always talks about as a key factor to increase innovation: “lowering the cost of failure”.