Interestingly, the so called “challenging environments” exhibit risks and other factors unique to the context. Nevertheless, the presence of entrepreneurial activity and innovation within such contexts is often taken for granted. This taken-for-granted-ness, however, has historically and perhaps unwittingly, contributed to a relatively nascent theoretical and empirical understanding of the scope, scale and impact that, such risks and other factors have on entrepreneurship and innovation vis-à-vis more stable industrial country contexts. These factors can combine and accumulate, often with escalating impact, making business venture creation or continuance a serious undertaking.

Though rarely acknowledged, if a business is sustained despite such odds, that is a major feat in and of itself. As such, and consistent with scholars worldwide, we call on researchers to make the study of such phenomena and the associated challenging contexts as the “Entrepreneurship’s Next Acts”. Towards that end, the Darwazah Center runs a competitive research call annually and provides financial support to scholars who conduct research that prioritizes the challenging environment of innovation and entrepreneurship within MENA to produce impactful knowledge that is less commonly available in the Western and industrialized countries.