Wharton in early November extended its global reach with the opening of the Wharton Entrepreneurship and Family Business Research Centre at the Centre of Excellence for Applied Research and Training (CERT) in Abu Dhabi.

The Centre will allow Wharton faculty to pursue research on entrepreneurship, innovation, family business practices and the challenges of doing business in the region. The initiative was spearheaded by Raffi Amit, Wharton’s Robert B. Goergen Professor of Entrepreneurship.

Noted Amit: “The insights we gain will have a broad and lasting impact on business leaders in the Mideast and worldwide.”

In addition to the research center, the Wharton-CERT partnership calls for the institutions to collaborate on the launch of a CERT-Wharton Business Plan Competition (Wharton BPC) and on the development of the Arabic-language edition of Knowledge@Wharton.

The first site in the Middle East to join the K@W network, the Arabic edition will make extensive use of mobile technology to analyze business trends in the Middle East and their effect on the larger global community. By disseminating the knowledge generated by Wharton’s faculty and delivering important regional business insights, the Arabic-language edition of K@W will further the School’s strategic goal of increased global engagement, both in the Middle East and with an Arabic-reading audience worldwide.