Professor Joe Haslam , Executive Director of the Owners Scaleup Program at IE Business School, speaking at the QBIC’s speaker series session at the Four Seasons Hotel.
Qatar Business Incubation Center (QBIC), owned by Qatar Development Bank (QDB), hosted its final interactive Speaker Series session of the year with Prof. Joe Haslam, Executive Director of the Owners Scaleup Program at IE Business School.
Haslam made a presentation on ‘The new era of scale-up entrepreneurship & the trillion dollar opportunities’ to an engaged audience, including QBIC startups, at the Four Seasons Hotel.
QBIC has always invested in the individual advancement of its entrepreneurs by offering seasonal Speaker Series sessions with renowned professionals and high-profile entrepreneurs such as Chris Free, Uber’s GM for Qatar and the UAE; Rabea Ataya, Bayt.com’s CEO and Founder; Elmar Mock, co-inventor of SWATCH; Simon Casson, VP and Regional GM at Four Seasons, Ibrahim Manna, GM Emerging Markets at Careem, and Terry Jones, founding chairman of Kayak as well as Travelocity.com, among many more.
With that impressive lineup of seasoned professionals, QBIC kept the bar high with Professor Joe Haslam who is not only Executive Director of the Owners Scaleup Program at IE Business School, but also the cofounder of several highly successful companies. The first company he co-founded, ‘Marrakech’, raised over $75m in venture capital and scaled to 250 staff. He is also the co-founder and Chairman of ‘Hot Hotels’, the first Spanish company to be accelerated by the Techstars programme in the USA.
Aysha Al Mudahka, QBIC’s CEO said: “We’re thrilled to be wrapping up an incredibly fruitful year with yet another Speaker Series session. We constantly strive, in this ever-evolving business world, to host speakers that can bring new insights and share their expertise from different disciplines - in this case Scaleups - with our entrepreneurs. Hosting renowned, forward-thinking professionals, such as Professor Haslam, allows us to further enhance the development of our entrepreneurs, and we look forward to hosting several globally recognized and influential speakers next year.”
Haslam’s session highlighted the importance of shifting focus and staying ahead of the curve. He emphasized the significance of moving away from a focus on innovation to one of sustainability, a move away from managing for scarcity to one of managing for abundance and a move away from thinking linearly to thinking exponentially.
The Speaker Series sessions bridge the gap between aspiring entrepreneurs, and successful professionals with valuable experience and knowledge on overcoming the challenging road to successful entrepreneurship.
Visiting speakers also provide one-on-one coaching sessions for QBIC’s incubatees, and depending on their business field, provide them with specialised, invaluable advice.
