Abu Dhabi: Entrepreneurs wanting to make it big in the UAE’s media industry should not fear working with others or getting their ideas stolen, experts in the capital said on Thursday, at the Abu Dhabi Media Summit 2014.

Speaking on the closing day of the media summit, Majid Al Suwaidi, Managing Director of Dubai Internet City and Dubai Outsource Zone (DICDOZ), urged upcoming entrepreneurs to refrain from delaying acting on their ideas.

“If you sleep on it for six months, someone out there will definitely take that idea and make something out of it. The whole idea is to create a ‘first market’ attitude and collaborate with colleagues and even competitors sometimes so you can bounce ideas off each other and give yourself room to grow. It doesn’t really matter who you’re competing with because the market is huge and so the more the merrier,” he said during a panel discussion on accelerating start-ups.

Al Suwaidi further revealed that taking successful concepts from all parts of the world and cultivating entrepreneurial ecosystems is the key formula that keeps the DICDOZ constantly evolving and up-to-date with worldwide technologies.

“The whole idea is to move with the technology as it is being developed,” he pointed out.

Meanwhile, Ramesh Jagannathan, Research Professor and Associate Dean of Engineering at the New York University Abu Dhabi, said almost everybody has the opportunity to develop their creativity and turn into a functional model.

“Entrepreneurship has become democratised because so many technologies are available. A fisherman or a person with a PhD can be creative. If you have an idea you can send it out to China to build a prototype or to India to build an operating system. It has become fairly easier than it used to be before when what was considered ‘state of the art’ technology was only available to a select few,” he said.

The move of individuals from rural to urban locations is urging governments to create mega-cities where the public needs services that cannot possibly be met by governments alone.

“We are talking about cities with over 50 million people. This is creating a new band of middle class that has needs in terms of health, education, jobs, water and so on. Policies can be created by the government but the kind of business model needed cannot be provided by them to make products and services for these people,” Jagannathan said.

“The landscape is being levelled and scalability is now by numbers as more small entrepreneurships are rising. Around 45 per cent of the world’s global GDP is going to come from seven new-world economies so in the UAE we have an opportunity to become a global force because of this white space, a whole new playground,” he added.

Al Suwaidi, meanwhile, reminded the audience that creating a community that understands each other and can work together is the cornerstone to what is being built at the DICDOZ. “We have 70,000 employees are working towards doubling that number over the next 10 years. People should not be afraid to approach us and find the investor or accelerator that they connect the most with — it’s all about chemistry,” he said.