ABSTRACT
With the rise of the internet as a global phenomenon over the last 20 years, the centres of business, globally, are in transition. In many countries the value from investment in traditional ‘heavy’ manufacturing industries is increasingly becoming no longer sustainable. This has prompted a national even global urgency to develop policies that reinvigorate innovation and entrepreneurship that in turn, enables the transformation of business centres. Many governments across the world have now begun programs to move the centre of their economies away from the industrial to the post-industrial by encouraging, promoting and promising assistance to developing national ‘start-up ecosystems’. The aim of this chapter is to present data from a project funded by the Council for Australia–Arab Relations within the Australian Government’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade that shows, inter alia, how innovation hubs in two newly emerging ecosystems in Sydney, Australia and Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE) have become the new post-industrial centres for business. Key objectives of the chapter are to show that: (i) that the start-up ecosystem is crucially reliant on transnational networks and processes; and (ii) that the gendered nature of these ecosystems remains overwhelmingly masculine notwithstanding efforts/policies to produce a more sustainable gender balance.
