Mahmoud Watad, William Paterson University professor of marketing and management, was named a Fulbright Scholar for the academic year 2013-14. Watad is spending the year conducting research on organizational innovation in Morocco, which currently suffers from high unemployment rates, especially among university graduates. “The Arab Spring has propelled the issue of unemployment to the top of the development agenda in countries such as Morocco,” he says. “To create quality jobs and chip away at rising unemployment, these countries must promote innovation and the creation of knowledge-intensive businesses.” In addition to conducting research on Moroccan firms, Watad, who is an expert on organizational effectiveness, information technology-enabled change, and innovation, is teaching classes at Al Akhawayn University, the only English-language public university in Morocco with about two thousand students. “I am enjoying teaching my management classes,” he says. “What is astonishing is that all the students, as well as the Moroccan faculty, speak three languages: Arabic, French, and English.”
