About This Section:

Thinking Big and Daring to Compete Globally!

Innovation has been the growth fuel for today's global market leaders. It has been a reliable source for higher profit margins, higher premiums, and sustained revenue growth. However, for many businesses in the Muslim world, this is an area least understood and hardly practiced. Today, there may not be a lack of innovation in our midst but it is clearly not understood as a systematic process.

Successful innovation is not a stroke of genius, nor does not evolve only through new groundbreaking discoveries or technologies. It is in-fact mostly a result of systematic and intentional business processes that seek to leverage changes and opportunities in market inefficiencies, demographics, market structures, industry restructurings, technologies and distribution channels-- all focused on identifying and delivering new and unique value to consumers.*

The world of business and finance in the Muslim world lies at a crossroads today. With the vast natural and human resources it possesses, it has yet to make its mark in the global marketplace. Any list of top companies in the world today illustrates the dismal state of business in the Muslim world. One of the key missing factors is clearly a lack of the practice of innovation which would lead to the delivery of market leading solutions.

There are some encouraging signs though; technology and research centers are flourishing from the Internet City in Dubai to the Multimedia Super Corridor in Kuala Lampur; successful management techniques are being adopted; and the internet and other technologies are being leveraged in many ways. We hope to highlight and support such efforts and in some small way contribute to the beginning of a process that helps to bring the innovation discipline to the forefront for individuals and corporations in OIC countries and elsewhere.

This section will provide practical insights and resources covering 'Innovation' as a business discipline and will focus on the following two areas:

1) Learning's from the best today:

Who better to learn from than the leading innovators in the global marketplace today. We will profile success stories, best-practices, and leading business thinking and resources from the best in the world today.

2) Understanding and addressing the barriers to Innovation in the Muslim world:

Some of the key barriers or issues to be addressed are Intellecual property management, patent filing, maximizing research and private enterprise interactions, cultural inhibitions to adapting innovation, etc.

One key barrier in the Muslim world is the negative perception of innovation as a concept itself! The very mention of it causes many Muslims to recall, by automatic association, the idea of bidah - or reprehensible innovation in religious matters.

Muslims have been intimidated by the concept for far too long. The Muslim world produced the likes of al-Jazari, Ibn Khaldun, Ibn Sina, Sulaiman, Abduh, Iqbal, Ben Nabi and a host of other trend setters precisely because they knew what the concept of bidah applies to and where innovative thinking is necessary.

Dinar Standard will highlight the contributions of great innovators from the Muslim world to help dispel this perception. The unique focus of these profiles will also be to translate their insights to the modern world of business. We will also begin a systematic coverage of the contemporary innovators in the Muslim world today which will serve to encourage others and to learn from the successes of those profiled.