Driver for economic development and innovation continues to be the entrepreneurs.
Some startups invent brand new markets while other manage to enter markets crowded by existing large companies. In this seminar we will explore making critical early decisions starting from chaos and creating an exciting new business. We will gain insights on the value of learning by doing, prototyping, discussing tradeoffs between analysis, experimentation and scale.
We will also review the courses offered by the Entrepreneurship Center.
Lama Hakem is the Education Programs Lead at the Entrepreneurship Center at KAUST. She has a Ph.D. in Conflict Analysis and Resolution. She was an assistant professor at different universities in Saudi Arabia. She has taught several classes for undergraduate and graduate students in the field of leadership, ethics, teaming, negotiation and entrepreneurship. Currently, Dr. Lama is Co-teaching the elective entrepreneurship courses, and Entrepreneurship for All. Also, she runs workshops on different topics including design thinking, leadership, entrepreneurship, and conflict resolution.
Dr. Bülent Erbilgin has over 30 years of industry experience of which 20 years were as an executive leader. He also has several years of teaching experience at the graduate level.
As an executive of seven startups and several public companies he successfully released products ranging from Cyber-security, Network Security, Web applications, SaaS, Complex high-availability software, Highly distributed systems, Analytics, Big data, IOT, Machine Learning to Network Intelligence products.
His teaching experience includes Leadership, Teaming, Ethics, Innovation, Entrepreneurship, Design Thinking, Product Development as well as Engineering Management at UC Berkeley, Northeastern University and KAUST.
In addition, Dr. Erbilgin has mentored founders and students in various entrepreneurship classes to identify startup opportunities, develop business plans, and VC presentations. He spent significant time with number of teams guiding them through all stages of forming a startup. Served on panels together with VCs to evaluate and score various startup teams as part of the classes.
Dr. Erbilgin blends his business leadership experience with an academic background to explore subjects from a business perspective in the classroom. Teaching philosophy: strong belief in Active Learning, case study analysis and experiential learning. Strong emphasis on students to learn to think rather than giving them “information”. Heavily leveraging “peer learning” where students learn from each other rather debates rather than being “instructed” by the “Instructor”
Educational background: Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering (Computer Architecture) and M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University.
Entrepreneurship Center, KAUST & University of California, Berkley & KAUST