Six students represented the Institute of Business Administration Karachi: Afshan Uroos (Ph.D. candidate), Muhammad Ahtesham, Shahoor Ahmed, Kehkashan Ishrat, Isra Imtiaz Ali, and Mazhar Hussain. While four were international students from the Small Enterprise Promotion and Training (SEPT) Program: Jazmín Ponce Gómez (Ph.D. candidate), Isabela Agyekum, Rihem Hssan, and Mariella Tellez Montaño.
After the presentations, professors and experienced academics enriched the discussion by providing feedback and comments. Moreover, international Ph.D. candidates and MBA students from the SEPT Program joined the symposium contributing to the exchange of knowledge, sharing experiences, and building scientific networks. Complementary, two workshops on how to publish in academic journals were delivered by researchers from both institutions.
To make the findings available to the scientific community, the SEPT Competence Center and IBA Karachi prepared a proceedings publication presenting the abstracts of the ten research. The topics included: the internationalization of SMEs in Pakistan, the internationalization of Mexican entrepreneurs and Tunisian SMEs towards European and German markets, international female entrepreneurship, and entrepreneurs with disabilities in global-south countries. As the following steps, all academics continue working on their research articles to publish them in academic journals by 2023.
IB Pakistan is a two-year project funded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) program “German–Pakistani Research Cooperation 2021–2022 and extensions 2021”, led by the SEPT Competence Center at Leipzig University with the Institute of Business Administration IBA Karachi.