Tamakkan Seminar On Innovative Thinking

http://www.1888pressrelease.com/tamakkan-seminar-on-innovative-thinking-pr-469621.html

 

The event, held at Mamoura, featured Julie Lewis, founder of Mountain High, thriller novelist SeumasGallacher, entrepreneur Younis al Sulaimi, and a posse of local and international poets, led by award winning slam poet Paul D’ Rogers.

Inspirational speaker Lewis spoke about her recent expedition to Antarctica with women breast cancer survivors and the impact a journey of such magnitude can shape one’s perspective on life, courage and achievement. “Climbing a mountain is much like business, you have to set your goals and open up your thinking to new experiences.” She advised entrepreneurs to be more courageous and to continually readjust their mental markers to explore new ways of thinking. She also showed a short film of the women’s expedition aimed at raising awareness about breast cancer.

Lewis, who is from England and lives in the UAE, travels across the world on vision-seeking expeditions.

Thriller novelist SeumasGallacher, from Scotland and residing in the UAE, spoke about his meteoric success in self publishing, explaining how he wrote his books, distributed them and continues to market them through local bookstores and Amazon’s online bookstore. His two books received over 60,000 downloads on Kindle and his social media following is paving the way for the imminent launch of his third novel. Gallacher runs a business consultancy but sees writing becoming a possible full-time career.

“I believe I two kinds of days, good days and better days. As an entrepreneur you should try, make mistakes, and keep on trying. Giving up is not an option. For self publishers, writing is only the first part, then there is editing, publishing, distribution and then marketing. Don’t ignore the next wave in publishing: Kindle and E-books are the secret to success, and social media plays an integral role.”

Sana Bagersh, the founder of Tamakkan stressed the need for entrepreneurs to continue learning and growing, by exploring all sources of information and inspiration. ‘At Tamakkan we see the growth of the entrepreneurial spirit as something that extends well beyond business, and extending into the realms of spiritual enrichment and creative exploration”.

Younis al Sulaimi, an Emirati entrepreneur whose 3-D printing business is supported by the UAE’s Khalifa Fund, offered an insightful view into the challenges and opportunities associated with setting up a pioneering technological venture. “It has been a rewarding experience and the entire team is very enthusiastic about the future of 3D printing.

Being a forerunner in a new business area comes with a lot of difficulties, and the main one is that you can’t start marketing the usual way, you first have to educate people, and that is something that takes a lot of time.”

A GUIDE FOR ENTREPRENEURS FROM BRANDMOXIE CHIEF

Neil Parmar

Topics: Entrepreneurs

Sana Bagersh is trying to take advantage of her position as the chief executive of the marketing firm BrandMoxie to help fellow entrepreneurs in the Emirates. But as she explains, her efforts to expand Tamakkan, a series of monthly seminars she launched on entrepreneurship in 2009, have led to some unique challenges.

  1. Q) What does “Tamakkan” mean?
  2. A) In Arabic, it means empower yourself. Arabic tends to be more polite. I just really wanted a jarring effect that you don’t have to wait for someone to spoon-feed you. You can do it.
  3. Q) Why did you launch this series?
  4. A) When I started BrandMoxie in 2004 a lot of people would call me and say, “How do you put together a marketing plan? How do you write a press release?” I thought it would be nice if BrandMoxie somehow acted as an enabler for more people like me to share knowledge … [with] people starting their own ventures. We focus on certain topics – branding, social media – but they’re quite broad in nature. If anybody has specific questions, they can ask during the seminar and get input from peers and experts.
  5. Q) How have you tried to expand what Tamakkan offers?
  6. A) A month ago we introduced short, one-day courses on subjects like the fundamentals of accounting for small businesses, how to get funding, how to hire the right people. We’re trying to keep them cheap. I’m talking to organisations to see if they want to pitch in.
  7. Q) How is that going?
  8. A) A lot of these big entities are so bureaucratic and take so long to decide. With entrepreneurship, things need to be faster. Entrepreneurs need help now.
  9. Q) How do you plan to help them in the future?
  10. A) [Providing referrals] is the only thing we’re able to do because we’re not a funded organisation and we don’t have a proper office. I’m hoping Tamakkan can evolve to offer an online knowledge base, in Arabic and English, on how to start this, how to do that, and a proper affair aimed at fueling more SME [small and medium-sized enterprises] creation. Hopefully if we get revenue coming in for courses we can support it a little more permanently.
  11. Q) On May 29, you’ll be taking the seminar to Dubai for the first time at the University of Wollongong. Why have you stayed in Abu Dhabi until now?
  12. A) I felt Dubai had so many things happening and with the Khalifa Fund we were getting a lot of people in Abu Dhabi who were funded but just didn’t know how to really make a go of it. There is a certain category of entrepreneurs in Abu Dhabi where money is really not the big problem – it’s knowledge. You get very young serial entrepreneurs who are well into their third or fourth venture, and it’s my belief that if they got some really good grounding when they started their first or second the survival rate would have been higher.

* Neil Parmar

Link: http://www.thenational.ae/business/media/a-guide-for-entrepreneurs-from-brandmoxie-chief