While it is ahead from the rest of the world in terms of property development, Dubai might want to start doing something about its garbage, whose daily volume reaches 9,000 tonnes, a top management innovator yesterday said.

Kip Knight, vice-president of marketing for eBay in North America, was one of key speakers at the three-day Management Innovation Forum that ended yesterday at the Dubai International Convention Centre.

The forum said innovation leaders are management thinkers who understand customer requirements and exploit new market opportunities, or access new technologies to deliver successful new products and services.

Knight told Khaleej Times that Dubai could send scientists or engineers to Germany or tap the European country's know-how and technology in the recycling of garbage.

He stressed that while Dubai still uses landfills to dispose of its garbage, Germany has eliminated all landfills and has been recycling everything for the last few years. Nancy Snyder, corporate vice-president for leadership and strategic competency development at Whirlpool in the US, said she would like to see brands created in Dubai becoming global in the next few years.

Aside from garbage, Knight said Dubai could also be innovative in harnessing solar energy to power its enormous property projects. He noted that Dubai enjoys so much sunshine all-year-round, and that the sun supplies the earth 8,000 times the energy that it actually needs.

"I wish Dubai would attract thinkers with innovative ideas that would lead to investments on solar energy," Knight said. He and Snyder, also a forum speaker, also said that some Dubai companies might want to work with the techies of Silicon Valley in California for some joint ventures on start-up companies or to incubate innovative but fledgling technological projects.

He cited, for instance, eBay, which started as a small online auction house and shopping site in 1995 and went on to become the world's undisputed online marketplace.

Today, eBay has 100 million items for sale, with 6.4 million products being added every day. It also has 233 million users, 1.3 million of whom rely on eBay for income.

He also cited Wikipedia, an online encyclopaedia that is 10 times bigger than Encyclopedia Brittanica even if it only has five full-time employees and 5,000 volunteers worldwide.

"Be open to new ideas from anywhere and anyone," he said, adding that most great products were discovered "accidentally". Among them were potato chips in 1853, ivory soap in 1863, microwave oven in 1946, and post-it notes in 1968. Today, post-it is a billion-dollar business for 3M.

Knight also mentioned Golcorp, which "struck gold" using the Internet. When the company was in trouble in 1999, it embraced the goal of finding six million ounces of gold by paying Dh2.1 million to anyone who could help the company find new gold deposits. He said Goldcorp identified 110 new targets, 80 per cent of which yielded eight million ounces of gold. This made the market cap reach Dh33.1 billion, from Dh367.3 million. This meant that the Dh367.3 invested in Golcorp stock was worth more than Dh11,000.