4SITE Forum: Investing for Sustainability, Innovation, Technology, Entrepreneurship

September 13, 2009 by RootSpaceOnline

RootSpace is working in collaboration with several key partners to organize 4SITE Forum: Investing for Sustainability | Innovation | Technology | Entrepreneurship, November 17-18 in Beirut.

Building on the success of Global Entrepreneurship Week 2008, a diverse group of partners present 4SITE Forum: Investing in Sustainability | Innovation | Technology | Entrepreneurship, an exciting, engaging, and innovative two-day forum to promote the growth of sustainable and innovative businesses in the WANA Region (West Asia/North Africa) by bringing together investors, innovators, and entrepreneurs from across various sectors. The 4SITE Forum will build a network of the pivotal participants in these arenas, and build a series of events and activities to promote knowledge-based economic development throughout the region.

4SITE Forum is a collaborative effort between RootSpace (a non-profit organization in Lebanon), Zawya.com, YallaStartup, Baraka Group (UAE), and Cisco (plus others coming soon!). If you are interested in joining with us, please contact us. The website for the Forum will be launching soon, built in collaboration with some of the sponsors behind TedX Dubai (www.tedxdubai.com).

4SITE Forum will help investors, innovators, and entrepreneurs overcome some of the challenges facing them in building successful and innovative game-changing businesses. The Forum will delve into some of the cutting-edge trends in technology, both regionally and globally, and discuss how players can leverage these trends to build thriving enterprises.

For investors, the Forum will illustrate the unique features of investing in web, technology, innovation, and open source, as well as connecting them with some of the region's hottest startups. At the same time, the Forum will help innovators understand how to commercialize their research and inventions, and improve research and development capacities in the region. The Forum will also introduce entrepreneurs to the forward-thinking incubators, angel networks, and venture capital funds in the region. 4SITE will include a series of demonstrations from seed-stage startups currently being incubated or launching around the region. Finally, the Forum will also showcase how social entrepreneurship and open source/open business models (such as Creative Commons and open innovation systems) can be powerful forces for social and economic development in the region.

4SITE Forum will not be your standard conference. The Forum will use new technologies, social networking platforms, and collaboration tools to connect people before, during, and after the event. Sessions will be participatory and fun, and the conference will include a special “OpenConference” area that will be open for anybody or group to host a discussion or workshop. Moreover, the 4SITE organizers strongly believe in the power of collaboration and sharing, and will seek to maximize the information available to all participants and others before, during, and on an ongoing basis between this and the future 4SITE Forums. (All content collected from the event will be licensed with a Creative Commons license to allow free use and sharing by anybody.)

We invite you to support this pioneering effort and promote the growth of innovation, technology, and entrepreneurship in the region as a sponsor, partner, speaker or participant.