Dr. Bijan Azad is an Associate Professor at the Olayan School of Business (OSB), American University of Beirut and the Director of the Samih Darwazah Center for Innovation Management and Entrepreneurship.

Bijan pioneered the popular Entrepreneurship Practicum graduate course at AUB (modeled after Steve Blank’s Lean LaunchPad). Bijan, in 1989 was co-founder of a successful map technology startup in Cambridge, Massachusetts, GIS/Trans (developed Dual Independent Map Encoding system, acquired by Etak Navigator, News Corp in 1995, later acquired by KeyHole and then Google Maps) & in 2001 he co-founded another successful map technology startup ILIS B.V. (acquired by ARCADIS bv 2003), in Arnhem, Netherlands.

Dr. Azad earned his Ph.D. and Master’s degrees from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.