Building regional champions with global impact

Unlocking Global Potential: How Regional Innovation Drives Worldwide Success

At Web Summit Qatar, Ania Lichtarowicz moderated a panel on transforming local strengths into global influence. Yasmin Kayali (Deloitte), Bashar Jaber (Pass), and Marko Čadež (Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Serbia) shared strategies for building robust regional foundations while competing internationally.

Ms. Kayali detailed Deloitte’s approach: intentionally activating its global network by connecting worldwide insights with regional depth for local execution. This involves adapting global playbooks to be locally relevant and customized, rather than simply duplicating Western ideas. She noted AI enhances creativity, acting as an enabler, and stressed future solutions must integrate policy, industry, business, and technology for global applicability.

Mr. Jaber shared Pass’s scaling journey, revealing that success came from meticulously refining operations, not just marketing. As a last-mile delivery company, Pass transformed its process from a few steps to a detailed ten-step system. This deep dive into operational “nitty-gritty” and understanding consumer pain points was fundamental to their growth.

Pass distinguishes itself by solving undiscovered operational problems, building all its technology in-house based on unique experiences. Mr. Jaber believes future transformation lies in making “boring” traditional industries like logistics, energy, and waste “cool” through scientific optimization, automation, and efficiency, creating new value.

Mr. Čadež highlighted Serbia’s remarkable tech boom. In a decade, software exports surged from €400 million to €4.5 billion, with IT engineers growing from 30,000 to 150,000. This made ICT software Serbia’s top export, driven by a strategic national ecosystem and significant public investment in science parks, computing infrastructure, and government-owned data centers.

Serbia’s success was further underpinned by obligatory coding in primary schools, fostering digital literacy and a high percentage of STEM students. This environment attracted major R&D centers from global companies, fueling innovation. Mr. Čadež advised regional companies to seek international partnerships to penetrate global markets, leveraging Serbia’s unique geopolitical position with diverse free trade agreements.

Looking ahead, Mr. Čadež stressed continued public investment in infrastructure like supercomputers. He emphasized fostering close collaboration between academia, research, and industry, and critically, facilitating the connection between domain knowledge and technology. The future, he concluded, involves deploying technology effectively across real-world applications, not just understanding the tech itself.