Nada al Qassimi was the head of media and marketing at the Dubai Health Authority when the company hired to run the campaign on diabetes botched the job. Having seen too many companies, especially foreign ones, run bad campaigns because of the lack of understanding of the local culture, she decided to open her own company, Two 12, in the midst of the recession in March 2008, to provide better marketing and advertising services to organisations in the UAE.
Over in Abu Dhabi, Ziad al Khaja and Abboud al Braiki of Visual Advertising created the city’s first roadside recycling bins that glow in the dark. “What inspired me to work on this project is the vision of the UAE leadership on using alternative energy. That was a big incentive for us, and we used the sun as a source of energy to illuminate the signboards on the recycling bins. These signboards are used for advertising and have zero footprint,” al Khaja told INSEAD Knowledge.
These Emiratis are the new breed of entrepreneurs who have emerged in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in recent years. The 2010 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) report on entrepreneurship in the UAE says that the region’s total entrepreneurial activity rate - which measures the percentage of the population either actively trying to start a business or already owning and managing a business less than three-and-a-half years old - sharply increased from 8.44 per cent in 2007 to 13.25 per cent in 2009.
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