Maher Kaddoura doesn’t like to mince his words. “I am the chief disruption officer… I like to disrupt things. I do not like it when they stay the same because they become tired. The only sign of life is growth, and growth comes from change, not from standing still… and so, everything I do is about change, it is about, what I call, disruptive innovation,” he says.
A businessman-turned-serial-entrepreneur and philanthropist, Kaddoura has done plenty of disruptive innovation during his career. Not content with being the managing partner for Accenture in the Middle East, he went on to launch his own hugely successful consulting firm Next Move, before throwing himself into philanthropy after the tragic death of his son in a road accident in Jordan. Since then, he has spearheaded the country’s drive to increase road safety, worked with over 400 schools to promote entrepreneurship and led Jordan’s push towards becoming a creative hub for the region.
But it was the sudden death of his son Hikmat in 2008, aged just seventeen at the time, that proved to be the real turning point.
“Through this experience, I found out that I truly believe in God. My faith was stronger than ever, and the test that I went through confirmed that,” he says, adding: “I realised that God has been preparing me for this moment all my life… Of course, it is painful, but it has opened many horizons. Above all, my life finally had a very clear purpose and meaning. I felt balanced.”
While his son was in the hospital, lying in a coma, Kaddoura immediately started researching the scale of traffic accidents in Jordan. “When I got the numbers, I realised that we have a civil war and that we are killing each other,” he says.
Shortly after, he founded a project titled Hikmat Road Safety Programme. He placed it, like many of his other projects, under his non-governmental organisation, Al Jude for Scientific Care.
“Everything came together at this point…thank God,” Kaddoura says.
“I energised people and I guided them. I put a strategy and pointed out that I want Jordan to be directionally correct. We managed to get very good results,” he says proudly about an issue so dear to his heart.
In spite of population growth and an increasing number of cars within the country, the Hikmat Road Safety Programme managed to reduce death rate by 32 percent and serious injuries by more than 46 percent.
How was that possible?
Apart from setting walking areas, pedestrian crossings and a respectable amount of barriers to separate children from buzzing roads, the project helped build 1,200 playgrounds in Jordan, each costing only $300.
“We convinced public schools to open their premises after teaching hours and during holidays in order to turn them into neighbourhood playgrounds,” says Kaddoura.
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“And with the availability of these large fields, we created a national football league in which 500 neighbourhoods competed for the cup last year. The winners, who came from a less-fortunate area in Jordan called Al Zarqa, were sent to Spain for a week to visit the Real Madrid Football Club,” he adds.
With such inspiring results, Kaddoura realized the potential scope of such projects.
“I used to make an impact in the corporate world and in governmental departments. So I said to myself, I can use the skills that I know well to get social impact, and I came up with this term: work around social innovation,” he says, adding: “Not just social innovation, but to ‘work around’ social innovation, because that is more practical.”
This year, for example, Kaddoura launched a programme titled ‘Sherkitna’ [our company], in which an amount of $281 is invested in the business ideas of both tenth and eleventh graders enrolled in public schools within Jordan. “They start a business and we help [coach] them by locally developing training videos to ease their process,” he explains.
“What we do is: we plant the seeds of entrepreneurship in our young at such an early age. In fact, there are already 403 businesses inside schools, all of which are making money,” he smiles.
Initially, the programme opted to train 500 schools, but 97 did not want to carry that responsibility. “That was fine. The eighty percent success rate is very good, and by next year, we will hopefully expand to 1,000 schools,” he says.
It seems like his vision has attracted the domino effect, as his projects have been making their way across Jordan’s horizon, one after the other. “With these projects, I want to make the country the knowledge and creative capital for the region,” he continues.
New Think Theatre is one example of a project established to support the country’s bid to embed itself in becoming a creative, innovative hub.
Kaddoura explains, “It is regular theatrical event in Amman inspired by TED [an ideas conference in California]. It is a two-hour show that addresses a wide spectrum of people over a range of different age groups, and it is not elitist.”
In fact, he is looking to elevate the event regionally next year: “Why not?” he asks. “We need to try finding our niche.”
That aside, Kaddoura went on to establish Start Alliance, a group of organisations allied to make Jordan more entrepreneurial and innovative. He points out, “We don’t want to eliminate organisations and overshadow them, we want this to provide tailwind to the entrepreneurship and innovation plane of Jordan.”
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Uniting such a big group of passionate people only provides even more ideas, and so, another project named Meydan was established; a new age accelerator focused on reducing the time from idea to revenue (I2R).
“In Meydan, we want to show people that it is okay to fine-tune and change your business model. We teach them to embrace change, befriend failure and to refrain from being scared,” he says.
The programme holds around 40 young people who offer a variety of skills; some produce corporate videos, some work with green products, like wind and solar energy, others are interested in arts.
“We want to support young people to start their own business, and even start their second business after they fail with their first. This is what we do,” he says.
A future project Kaddoura set his eyes on is an attempt to identify 100 touristic assets in Jordan, all in an effort to push it into a hub.
“I get really upset when I travel the world and see their touristic attractions, when I know Jordan can do the same,” he says.
“I want to identify 100 small touristic locations in Jordan… I have been thinking about it for one year and now I am going to pilot it,” he says, adding: We can provide funds for someone to rent bicycles in an area, or someone who wants to make crafts [in one of the streets], among other ideas.
All of Kaddoura’s projects have once concept in common: they deal with people.
“Jordan does not have a lot of natural resources, we are not strategically in the middle of a trade zone, and the economy is not doing well,” he says. “The only thing we have is people and we need to leverage that asset. We need to become a hub of innovation, knowledge and creativity. That has to do with people.”
Kaddoura adds: “Every single individual has opportunities that will come before him. Some people can spot it and some people just let it go.”
So far, Kaddoura has proved to be the master of spotting the right opportunities.
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