On March 13th, the Abu Dhabi Chamber of Commerce and Industry, in cooperation with Bearing and Emirates Experts Consulting, organised a seminar on Innovation Driven Competitive Advantages, with the attendance of Executives from more than 100 companies and establishments operating in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi and a number of Managers and Directors from the Abu Dhabi Chamber of Commerce.
His Excellence Mohammed Helal Al Muhairi, Director General of the Abu Dhabi Chamber, opened the seminar by saying that the leadership of the United Arab Emirates pays a great attention to encouraging the culture of creativity and innovation within education and business.
The Director General continued to say “This reflects the approaches of our government and its awareness towards spreading this culture in a way that pushes the economic and social development process forward and offers the opportunity for all UAE citizens to create, innovate and participate actively in enhancing the place of the UAE on all levels and in all fields”. 
I was the main speaker at the seminar and I started by emphasizing the key role of creativity. I quoted Joseph Schumpeter, who said “Innovation is creative destruction, where entrepreneurs combine existing elements in new ways”.
I then presented methods for how to work with corporate innovation and common fallacies and gaps. The most part of the seminar was focused on a discussion on how to make corporate innovation work in order to achieve a sweetspot which competitors are unable to reach.
Further in my speech, I emphasized the importance of creativity and innovation in enhancing competitiveness and the importance of creativity in the business world in addition to presenting the means of launching the culture of creativity and its means and practices.
As the final part in my speech, I presented the Innovation Radar framework, which was developed by Mohanbir Sawhney, Robert C. Wolcott and Inigo Arroniz at MIT in their 2006 article The 12 Different Ways for Companies to Innovate.
The Innovation Radar shows how one can work with innovation for competitive advantage in twelve dimensions throughout the business system of a firm. The Radar is shown in the illustration below and the interested reader can follow this link to download the article.
The twelve dimensions of innovation are described in the table below.
The interested reader can review the presentation from the seminar here below.
[slideshare id=17646194&doc=bearing-presentationoninnovationdrivencompetitiveadvantage-adcci-2013-03-13-130324121057-phpapp01]