How Dubai Next can be a gamechanger for the startup ecosystem

How Dubai Next can be a gamechanger for the startup ecosystem

The recent initiative by Dubai Crown Prince Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Dubai Next, is a government platform to drive entrepreneurship and innovation. The initiative has the scope to make the UAE an innovation hub. An IBM Institute study found that 90 per cent of startups fail within the first five years of their inception. Almost all the reasons for the failures are broadly related to innovation and leadership: business models, planning, customer insights, lack of original ideas, focus, agility, tech capability, and leadership gaps. Nearly 80 per cent of investors said that startups lack unique business models, as the majority of them copy-paste successful models from elsewhere without unique local insights. The Dubai Next platform should not subscribe to what most people think of startups - "Steve-Jobs-arrives-on-a-clamshell-and-the-world-is-changed-forever“. As the Valley entrepreneur and doyen of the lean startup movement, Steve Blank, puts it, a disciplined approach like the Discovery Driven Disruption (DDD) process can simply reverse the failure rate dramatically - and at much lower costs. Dubai Next can help improve the success rate of its cohorts by embracing this lean startup methodology. The core idea of DDD is that rather than creating an expensive, risky plan