Book excerpt: The book presents high-quality research papers presented at the 1st AUE International research conference, AUEIRC 2017, organized by the American University in the Emirates, Dubai, held on November 15th-16th, 2017. The book is broadly divided into three sections: Creative Business and Social Innovation, Creative Industries and Social Innovation, Education and Social Innovation. The areas covered under these sections are credit risk assessment and vector machine-based data analytics, entry mode choice for MNE, risk exposure, liquidity and bank performance, modern and traditional asset allocation models, bitcoin price volatility estimation models, digital currencies, cooperative classification system for credit scoring, trade-off between FDI, GDP and unemployment, sustainable management in the development of SMEs, smart art for smart cities, smart city services and quality of life, effective drivers of organizational agility, enterprise product management, DEA modeling with fuzzy uncertainty, optimization model for stochastic cooperative games, social media advertisement and marketing, social identification, brand image and customer satisfaction, social media and disaster management, corporate e-learning system, learning analytics, socially innovating international education, integration of applied linguistics and business communication in education, cognitive skills in multimedia, creative pedagogies in fashion design education, on-line summative assessment and academic performance, cloud concept and multimedia-based learning in higher education, hybrid alliances and security risks, industry and corporate security significance, legal regulation and governance. The papers in this book present high-quality original research work, findings and practical development experiences, and solutions for a sustainable future.