Bijan Azad, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor at the Olayan School of Business (OSB), American University of Beirut and the Director of Samih Darwazah Center for Innovation Management and Entrepreneurship. Bijan pioneered the popular Entrepreneurship Practicum graduate course at AUB (modeled after Steve Blank’s Lean LaunchPad at Stanford). In 2015 he designed AUB’s Scale-Up Readiness Program that focuses on scale up challenges of companies in $1-$5 million revenue range in the Middle East. The program combines just-in-time executive education with diagnosis of company scale-up readiness as well as coaching to overcome barriers to scaling up. This is the first program of its kind in the Middle East with twelve companies in Jordan which have already gone through the program and are implementing scaling strategies—6 firms have already raised $17 million in growth funding.
Dr. Azad, in 1988 was co-founder of a successful map technology startup in Cambridge, Massachusetts, GIS/Trans (developed fast search for Dual Independent Map Encoding system, acquired by Etak Navigator, News Corp in 1992, later the technology was acquired by Keyhole, and by Google Maps) & in 2001 he co-founded another successful map technology startup ILIS bv (acquired by ARCADIS bv 2003), in Arnhem, Netherlands.
Dr. Azad earned his Ph.D. and Master’s degrees from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.