2021

Scholars within the field of technical and professional communication (TPC) have called for situating the field in wider social, cultural, political, and global contexts. Despite a growing body of scholarship in this area, less attention has been focused on ways these issues are bound up in 21st-century global innovation and start-up ecosystems. This article addresses these issues by examining case studies of three high-tech initiatives in an emerging start-up ecosystem within the Occupied Palestinian Territory. In making this move, the research offers a theoretical and methodological framework for examining global innovation systems as they are constructed, enacted, maintained, extended, and transformed. Arguing for attention to the links

2021

To boost corporate efficiency in both the public and private sectors, innovation is fundamental. Efficient technological transfer and the role of public-private sector collaboration play a major role in the modern growth of knowledge-based economies. As a public service organization, municipalities normally coordinate with all partners to draw up strategies and use them in communities. A new vision is needed for the Gaza Strip municipalities, where all public and private stakeholders work together to co-design and co-develop new cutting-edge products and services aimed at generating shared value through entrepreneurial behaviour. However, concrete examples of smart city projects revealed that municipalities often do not have the necessary capabilities as well as innovative approaches to collaborate with start-ups and other stakeholders’ ecosystems. So, this paper aims at analyzing (open) innovation in the municipal sector shedding lights on the barriers and challenges that municipal...

This is a book about innovation and entrepreneurship, and how one small country, Israel, came to embody both. This is not a book about technology, even though we feature many high-tech companies. While we are fascinated by technology and its impact on the modern age, our focus is the ecosystem that generates radically new business ideas.

Paper presented at the Southern States Communication Association conference, Montgomery, AL, USA., 2019

Nine kilometers north of Ramallah the first-ever planned Palestinian city is being built. The seemingly intractable conflict between Arab Palestinians and Israelis make Rawabi a complex issue. Some individuals do not want it to succeed, while others consider it to be an important step in building a Palestinian state. This exploratory study sought to discern how members of the Rawabi leadership team construct stories to create an overarching narrative about the project’s impact on Palestinians and Palestinian – Israeli relations. Findings from the interviews are presented and the implications of the stories are discussed to create a master narrative.

2010

Palestine is classified as a factor-driven economy; it exhibits a low early-stage entrepreneurship rate (the proportion of the adult population who are involved in early stage entrepreneurial activity is around 9%) among factor-driven countries, and among the MENA seven GEM countries (14.7%). The low participation rate in early-stage entrepreneurship (TEA) is due to the low rate of involvement in nascent businesses (3% for Palestine and 8.6% for the MENA-7 countries). In the other stages of entrepreneurship, Palestine exhibits rates closer to that of the MENA-GEM countries (baby business rate is 6% for Palestine and 5.8% for the MENA-7 countries; established business rate is 6.9% for Palestine and 8.2% for the MENA-7 countries). Global Entrepreneurship Monitor: Palestine Country Report 2009, The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM), MAS, and IDRC.

The different settlement strategies of the late century and the violence of the ongoing conflicts are reflected on urban and rural landscapes, leading to situations where any previous identity of place seems to have been lost. This covers only the surface of territorial conformations: underneath the current urban sprawl lye ancient structures of the deeprooted history of Palestine, lines of force for the present landscape. Even today the urban pattern mostly follows the ancient corridors of connection, today fragmented by several cuts. While, in about one century, no new towns were founded, during the last decades, with the significant population growth, more than five hundred small villages have spread spontaneously, but often without any primary services, while hundreds of new Israeli settlements, favouring the emergence of new global practices, further worsened the conditions of urban services and infrastructure networks. Since 1967 the absence of any Palestinian local plan highlighted the unbalanced planning with the Israeli side, a globalized context with a long urbanization process. Some existing crowded cities underwent uncontrolled expansion and urban sprawl, compromising the cultural heritage sites and the agricultural sector, strategic not only economically, but even for the identity and the cultural roots of the country. Over the last years, under the PNA government, housing and infrastructure projects witnessed major developments, focusing both on existing cities -for increasing the functional vocation of each one and the density within built-up areas -as well as on new towns. Rawabi, the first city planned under the Palestinian Authority, is an example where to investigate the hybrid character of "glocal" in today's Palestine, where the traditional relations of the village of origin, the strongest element of identity, merge together with a new sense of urban identity.By considering some cases of spatial and urban transformations, this paper would try to investigate the cultural impact of social and economic globalization on the Palestinian landscape, as well as the relation between local culture and a modern character that, framed in global urban dimensions and related to the Israeli occupation, is sometimes unable to meet the real local needs.

Businesses

In this exploratory study, we employed multiple case-based approaches to explore and advance our understanding of how some entrepreneurial firms in unstable and extreme contexts achieve and sustain high growth. We included five Palestinian entrepreneurial firms from different sectors. The findings suggest that several factors play a significant role in how entrepreneurial firms in an extreme context such as Palestine achieve and sustain high growth. These factors are innovation and know-how, family growth, opportunities for exploration and exploitation, human capital, focusing strategy, business and social networks, foreign aid, and flexibility and adaptability.

] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: "This book highlights marginalized labor and entrepreneurial market segments and reviews strategies used to prepare for technology changes globally with the intent to provide a series of recommendation by thought leaders that may aid in growing and sustaining a more inclusive global society"-Provided by publisher.

This study focuses on start-up entrepreneurs on the move—in coordination with an array of other actors—as they weave and are woven into transnational networks. Central to this study is a shift from activity to mobility systems. Building on technical communication scholarship, the frame integrates actor networks and activity theory knotworks. Disrupting workplace and national container models (methodological nationalism), the analysis is grounded in a study of Israeli start-up entrepreneurs. Dubbed the Start-Up Nation, Israel contains more start-ups per capita than any other country in the world, with its high-tech industry made up of a dense ecosystem of conferences, accelerators, meetups, social media, and coworking spaces. Tracing actants' trajectories across this social field, the author