AMMAN - Princess Sumaya bint El Hassan of Jordan, President of El Hassan Science City (EHSC), and President of the Royal Scientific Society, received on Monday the Albert Einstein Medal for distinguished achievement from the University of Ulm, Germany in recognition of her achievements in the areas of education, science and technology, and innovation and entrepreneurship.
She received the medal, which is the highest award granted by the University of Ulm, during the opening ceremony of the international conference on “Excellence in Education 2009”, organized by the “International Centre for Innovation in Education” and the University of Ulm. The ceremony was attended by the president of the University of Ulm, Professor Karl Joachim Ebeling, the Lord Mayor of Ulm, Ivo Gonner, and the eldest son of Mr. Tarek Nasser Joudeh, in addition to a large number of scholars, researchers and guests representing several high-level international institutions.
Princess Sumaya opened the conference with a lecture in which she addressed many topics related to education, science and technology, and entrepreneurship and innovation.
She said that any talk about building a knowledge based economy necessitates first developing workers and becoming proficient at new enterprises creation; innovation and entrepreneurship are linked at this economic junction.
The most organic expression of a society’s capabilities perhaps is through the economic self-determination represented by indigenous development of products, services and solutions that come as a result of innovation and new enterprise creation, she noted.
“The majority of R&D in the developed world has begun to shift to small and medium sized enterprises, many of them backed by venture capitalists who represent savvy investors that understand the market potential for innovative products, services and solutions that rely on innovation to derive a competitive advantage" she said.
"For these advantages to be defensible, the innovations themselves must represent some sort of intellectual property that can be protected first as a trade secret and then perhaps legally by copyrights, patents, and trademarks,” she added.
She pointed out that “A simple value chain perhaps has now taken shape in our minds at the El Hassan Science City that I head and that was launched in April of 2007, where we understand that people build institutions, institutions develop programs, and these programs, produce talent and innovation."
She added that "building these institutions creates value for society by producing human capital and innovation; utilizing the outputs of these institutions by reducing theory to practice and converting innovation into enterprises captures value for society.”
“Succeeding at value creation without succeeding at value capture creates only part of the dynamic necessary to build a knowledge economy and given the global competition for top human capital, it is more likely that leading minds will be lost to competing economics that are able to capture the value others create.” she noted.
The Conference bestowed its shield upon Prince El Hassan bin Talal of Jordan, the founder of El Hassan Science City and Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Royal Scientific Society, in recognition of his distinguished intellectual, cultural and scientific work.
Jordan's queen urges fight against school violence