Report from the AKEA-Conference

by Charles Savage, Knowledge Enterprise, Munich

Report from AKEAME’s (www.akeame.com) Conference by Charles Savage, Knowledge Enterprise, Munich:

The AKEA Conference (Arabian Knowledge Economy Conference ), held in Jeddah on January 12 and 13, drew between two and three hundred participants. Please see the given web site for the list of speakers.

• The range of presentations ran from ways to inspire economic development in a region through Knowledge Innovations Zones and Innovation to ways to mine the value of IP and beyond. From The New Club of Paris Leif Edvinsson and Ahmed Bounfour attended and were among the speakers.
  
  
• HRH Prince Khalid Al-Faisal, the Governor of the Makkah Province (including Jeddah, Mecca and Medina) was the Conference sponsor. He spoke the first evening and invited the speakers to his home the day after the conference to listen to the suggestions of each speaker). It seems he and perhaps the King have a keen interest in what it will take to move Saudi Arabia towards a Knowledge Economy.
  
  
• Through the morning and into the early afternoon of the second day, three Knowledge Café’s where held: Industry, Education and Youth. The dialogue was intense and the suggestions wide ranging. The Youth Café drew about 100 young people, 1/3 of them women. The energy, intensity and quality of suggestions shows the exciting future of the fast evolving Arab society.
  
  
• Prof. Salim Al-Hassani, who has had a distinguished career at the University of Manchester, UK, in Mechanical Engineering, was asked by a leading museum director in the UK to identify the Arab contributions to science. He discovered that in western science, we jump from the Greeks to the Renaissance, a gap of about a thousand years. Prof. Al-Hassani discovered that during these thousand years the Arabs were most inventive: the toothbrush, fountain pen, cat gut, forceps, etc., things that are a normal part of our lives, even if we do not know the origin. As we look ahead, I realized we also need to look back to connect with the inspiration of cultures past.
  
  
• The AKEA leadership, Abdulla Al-Subayani, Khalid Al-Mutairi and Jamal Al-Mutair deserve our respect and perhaps membership in the New Club of Paris, as they are certainly on the cutting edge of helping the Knowledge Economy to happen.
  
  
• The press coverage was excellent. Also have a look under Services -> Publications 2008-01-14 etc.