Dr Javaid Laghari, former Chairman of the Higher Education Commission and current Chairman of the HEC National Task Force to Review the Performance and Effectiveness of Business Incubation Centers, visited the Institute of Business Management on July 15, 2026, accompanied by Dr Eram Abbasi, a member of the same task force. The visit brought together two of Pakistan’s most consequential voices on higher education and incubation policy with IoBM’s leadership for a focused discussion on the university’s research, innovation, and entrepreneurship initiatives and the institutional frameworks that support them.
During the visit, the delegation met with IoBM President Talib Karim and engaged with representatives from the Shahjehan Syed Karim Incubation Center and the Office of Research, Innovation and Commercialization at IoBM. The discussions covered IoBM’s current initiatives across research, innovation, entrepreneurship, and industry-academia collaboration, providing the task force delegation with a detailed picture of how one of Karachi’s leading private-sector universities has been building and operating its incubation and commercialisation infrastructure. IoBM’s incubation programme has a track record that includes 30 startups graduated across five cohorts, with selected ventures receiving seed funding and several going on to scale both domestically and internationally, making it a substantive case study for a task force examining what effective business incubation looks like within a university setting.
The visiting delegation shared insights and recommendations aimed at further developing IoBM’s research and innovation ecosystem, drawing on the task force’s broader mandate of assessing business incubation center performance across Pakistan’s higher education institutions and identifying what the strongest models are doing that others can learn from. An interactive discussion with faculty and departmental representatives gave the visit a consultative dimension that went beyond a one-way review, creating space for IoBM’s academic community to engage directly with the task force’s observations and contribute their own perspective on the challenges and opportunities facing university-linked incubation in the current environment.
The visit to IoBM sits within a broader pattern of institutional engagement that Dr Javaid Laghari and the HEC task force have been conducting across Pakistan’s university ecosystem, which has earlier included a visit to NIC Islamabad where similar discussions on incubation best practices and university-entrepreneurship linkages took place. For IoBM, the task force visit represents both an external validation of the work the university has been doing through SSKIC and ORIC and an opportunity to receive high-level guidance on how to continue developing its research and innovation infrastructure in alignment with national priorities.
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