Last week, the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania announced a new partnership with the Abu Dhabi–based Centre of Excellence for Applied Research and Training (CERT), a top private education provider in the Middle East.
As part of the collaboration, Wharton and CERT will establish a research center in Abu Dhabi where Wharton faculty will study entrepreneurship, innovation and family business. The two institutions also will work together to develop an Arabic-language version of online business journal Knowledge@Wharton, allowing for broader dissemination of ground-breaking research out of the Wharton School.
“The Wharton-CERT partnership is a key example of an innovative collaboration that helps pave the way for putting global knowledge into practice,” University of Pennsylvania President Amy Gutmann said in a statement announcing the new partnership.
“At Penn, we are committed to using our vast intellectual resources to gain knowledge and insights for use in the search for solutions to some of the most vexing problems facing our world today,” Gutmann continued. “This new initiative will advance our understanding of the Middle East and provide our faculty with rich new areas for research.”
The Wharton-CERT relationship will formally begin on August 1st, and a delegation of senior Wharton officials will travel to Abu Dhabi in November to take part in the Festival of Thinkers and officially celebrate the new partnership.
Professor Raphael Amit, the Robert B. Goergen Professor of Entrepreneurship, will lead Wharton’s collaboration with CERT and oversee creation of the Wharton Entrepreneurship and Family Business Research Center. “We stand to gain greater clarity on innovation and family business to the benefit of the United Arab Emirates and more broadly, the Middle East,” Amit said of the new initiative.
The Arabic edition of Knowledge@Wharton will become the first site in the Middle East to join the Knowledge@Wharton Network, which is celebrating its tenth anniversary. K@W, through its existing editions in the United States, Latin America, China and India, reaches a global audience of 1.3 million subscribers.
“We expect the Arabic version to be a source of global insight for people in the Middle East and a source of knowledge about the region for the K@W audience,” Mukul Pandya, executive director and editor-in-chief of the K@W network, said in a statement.
To learn more about the new Wharton-CERT collaboration, click here.
