The other peep essentially explained a scheme they have where they would pay up to 25% of the salary of someone I hired to do R&D. This is something I am going to take them up on.

As for help getting into the UAE market, we still have had zero assistance. But we’ve managed without their help. It turns out that Dubai practically imploded the month after we had all our initial meetings.

Fortunately we’re now working for a major player in Abu Dhabi – one of the most interesting organisations I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with. Everything’s heavily NDA’d up so I can’t name names, but suffice to say this story has a happy ending.

The ‘Targetting Innovation’ team on the otherhand seemed more interested in ticking boxes and getting me to sign things. This of course is to have some kind of audit trail to show the powers that be that they are meeting and engaging people. I’d be more interested in knowing if they were helping people. But that’s just me.

bag of pish.

Good luck anyway. I hope that it works out for you guys soon.

Cheers.

I’m very please to say that Jim didn’t pull any punches and admitted their failure which he said was down to a combination of systems and human error which resulted in a break down in communication between departments. Crucially, he didn’t dwell on this, instead getting down to business to explain what he’s going to do to resolve matters.

I’m expecting to have a meeting next week with the appropriate peeps. Better late than never? We’ll see.

My first impressions were pretty solid, doing business in the Emirates is a breath of fresh air. People are very open to meeting based on a cold call, although getting through to people can be hard. Phone is definitely a better option than email though.

They aren’t afraid to cut a meeting short to re-arrange for another day with additional people they feel would be interested in what you have to say. It’s an efficient no b.s. way to work. I like it.