Graduation Ceremony 5
Monday 24th November 2014 at 4.30 p.m.
JESUITS’ CHURCH – VALLETTA
Graduand’s Address
Mr Ivan Bartolo
a Master in Knowledge-Based Entrepreneurship graduand
All of us here have now gone through at least two cycles of University study. With our first degrees we thought we could go out
and help build a better world. After stepping outside, we realise there are many more tools we can learn to use to realise our goals.
That is what brought us back to our University, to refine our skill sets and to develop new ones.
Besides four established courses of study, today, we are celebrating graduands in two new Master courses, Master in Knowledgebased Entrepreneurship and Master of Science in Digital Games. These areas of study reflect the way the job market is shifting –
dependence on new technology and the ability to identify and develop an idea to fruition into a viable, sustainable product or
service.
Please allow me to say a few words about our course and how it appeals to budding entrepreneurs. As students, we all have
dreams. On graduating, some of us are lucky to find a job or set up your own office that satisfies that dream and in which you can
flourish and succeed. For many, we get chained to an employee’s desk, frustrated that we haven’t quite satisfied our search for
mental fulfilment.
Students that applied for the first and second cycles of the Knowledge-Based Entrepreneurship course came from a wide variety of
backgrounds, from accountants to engineers, a number of IT graduates, medical professionals and scientists, marketing graduates
and also an architect. Some of us were fresh out of University and others had been in industry for over twenty-five to thirty years.
These students, we, have one thing in common: our search to find an answer to that elusive question: What if I could make MY
idea a reality?
The Centre for Entrepreneurship and Business Incubation is the brainchild of the Rector Professor Juanito Camilleri and the
Director of the Centre, Dr. Ing. Saviour Zammit, who, in partnership with ISIS Innovation Limited - the technology transfer arm
of Oxford University, have created a coaching environment which challenges the students to think and act outside their comfort
zone. We were pushed to understand that we have to take decisions within limited time and with the information at hand. We
were made to understand risk and read risk and to pick up the tools and skills needed to commercialise our ideas.
Ideas only have value when they are acted upon and become a product or service. This does not mean that a good idea will
succeed. Forbes report an over 80% failure rate for start-up businesses yet, every minute, somewhere, someone is starting up
another fresh new venture. We have to learn from our failures and of those of others. During the course we came to understand
how even simple rudimentary ideas can become disruptive and ground-breaking.
We have here colleagues from the Institute of Earth Systems and The Faculty of Economics, Management and Accountancy where
the concepts of sustainability and financial viability are enshrined. These noble goals should be the foundations of any business
venture, together with commitment and resilience in the face of competition. Yet companies will fail, even some that we,
ourselves, will embark on. This should not deter us from trying again. We Maltese have always been known for our
resourcefulness with a significant number of people distinguishing themselves around the world as heads of industry. What would
help us to flourish is a fertile soil, investment capital made available through business angels, venture capitalists, grants and access
to bank finance.
Money alone does not make a business venture happen. Financial instruments such as the European Social Funds (ESF) grant
have made it possible for us to participate in this course by covering the course fees. We must also thank the University Senate for
having the foresight to create and offer such a ground-breaking course of tuition. We are not undergraduates with few
responsibilities beyond finishing our studies. Most of us have moved on and taken on different social responsibilities.
Participating in such an intensive course required not only dedication from the students but a web of support and loads of
patience from our families and friends as we forged ahead, taking up time and energy that could have otherwise been spent with
them. To all these people, I say thank you.
In our lives we tend to look at successful role models and try to emulate their success. Out of the billions of people in the world we
are constantly bombarded by the names of a few who have made a global name for themselves. Many other unsung entrepreneurs
are also helping offer us to live a better life in incremental steps, others are disruptive. Jobs was such a visionary who saw in the
early 80s the potential of personal computing at a time when the world was still coming to grips with a nascent computer age.
Some of his methods may not have been orthodox but the determination, focus and understanding of what the client needs have
been critical to the success of many of the products that he and the company have made commonplace. Likewise, our success in
any endeavour that we undertake will be measured by how successfully we translate the client’s needs into benefits.
I will end with the Steve Jobs’ closing comment to the Stanford Commencement speech in 2005: ”Stay hungry. Stay foolish”. This
quote has become my motto whenever I stumble. It is now up to us to believe in ourselves, our ideas and in our ideals.