Milan… The city of mediapreneurs!
Media gurus, government officials and promising entrepreneurs were gathering last Wednesday at the Milan Chamber of Commerce to discuss the future of media and mechanisms to better support technopreneurs (technology entrepreneurs). The event was organized by PROMOS in cooperation with Creative Commons, “Meet The Media Guru” and the local government of Lombardy.
Over the full-day event, I was glad to speak at the same panel with peers from the Arab World: Abdullatif Al Sayegh -the CEO of Arab Media Group one of the powerful player in the scene of Arab media, and Mohammad Abdullah -the Executive Director of Dubai Media City. I also was glad to speak to Antonio Ferrari -the World-class journalist who interviewed leaders across the world including H.M. King Abdullah few days right before the recent visit of the Pop to Jordan. I was also glad to meet Roberto Ronza -the Senior Advisor of the Lombardy Region in Italy.
For Milan, media business occupies a huge space of the landscape of the local economy and plays a great role in promoting it as the city fashion, history, art and business opportunities.
During the panel discussion, statistics about traditional media in the Arab world and future of the Media after the rise of Media 2.0 (social web) were presented. As part of discussion interesting ideas were raise, like the how policians and celebrities are adapting with the new media? and how new media will affect the positioning of traditional media instead of replacing it? (Taking for example, the status of radio and cinema after the widespread of TV) Also, how the growth and spread of new media is dependent on the development of infrastructure (internet speed and cost of bandwidth, availability of supporting devices and enabling technologies.. etc.)
During my talk, I focused on Innovation as the primary competitive advantage in the 21st century -while price and quality were the most dominant competitive advantages of businesses in previous centuries- and I moved to speak about the progress of the Queen Rania Center for Entrepreneurship in nurturing innovation by establishing a specialized training Institute in the domain of systematic Innovation.
Speaking about Innovation, I presented two success stories from Jordan: Ketab Technologies and Kindisoft and how these entrepreneurs managed to gain remarkable market access and achieve rapid growth and recognition of world class companies such as Googleand Disney.
In the afternoon session, there were one-to-one pre-scheduled meetings where I get the chance to meet a representatives from FBF -an international network branding company and candidate for one of Oskar Awards. I was pleased to talk to two exceptional entrepreneurs Fuse Creative Lab and Lorri who have successfully developed amazing interactive surface solutions using gesture recognition technologies, which can really achieve better performance than Windows Surface and Xbox technologies and can be applied for so many other applications.
I will be writing a special post about them soon. But for now, I can keep leave you with this interesting appetizer that demonstrates one of their solutions!
