Hani Elzoumor - new PhD student at IIE

Hani Elzoumor has just started his PhD program in innovation, entrepreneurship and management of intellectual assets, at the Institute of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the School of Business, Economics and Law, the University of Gothenburg. He is originally from Cairo, Egypt, where he has a Bachelor’s degree in Economics and Statistics from Cairo University, where he also worked with teaching and as a research assistant of economics, at the Economics department.

However, this is not his first time in Sweden. He has already spent two years in Gothenburg, since he studied his master’s education in Entrepreneurship at the School, as a Swedish Institute (SI) international scholar and he received his master’s degree in 2019.

- During my master’s programme, I got interested into the role of disruptive technologies into transforming innovation systems and by then I had the opportunity to write my master thesis as a collaboration project between the University of Gothenburg and Chalmers University of Technology in the latter’s Challenge Lab, says Hani Elzoumor.

You can download read the master thesis here: The role of innovation-driven SMEs in upscaling niche innovations within a regional context: An investigation of SMEs developing new mobility solutions in Västra Götaland County.

PhD the next step on the academic career

After Hani finished his master’s programme, he decided to directly pursue his PhD, as the next step in his academic career. One of his first choices was the institute of Innovation and Entrepreneurship.

- Since my master’s program is an education provided by the Institute of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (IIE), I have been in a close contact with the researchers and teachers and got to know their areas and fields of research, says Hani

When a position opened up at IIE he applied and he was selected amongst more than 50 applicants. The PhD project is a part of Professor McKelvey's VR program; Entrepreneurial ecosystems: Transforming society through knowledge, innovation and entrepreneurship.

What kind of research will you be focusing on during your PhD education?

During my PhD at the institute, I expect to focus into the innovation processes of knowledge intensive entrepreneurial ecosystems, with the geographical location of western Sweden. That would include innovation strategies for entrepreneurial business organizations such as start-ups, and Small and Medium Enterprises (SME), from an evolutionary economics perspective.

Indeed, I have an interest to investigate collaboration dynamics between different stakeholders within innovation projects, platforms and initiatives in such ecosystems, in order to identify success and failure factors of such projects. I expect that research would have direct implications in terms of public policy recommendation that would aim to enhance and solidify the intended outcomes of such initiatives.