Students took part in the Challenge for Innovation (C4I) held from January 6 to January 13 2019, in the United Arab Emirates University’s Science and Innovation Park, to boost their business ideas.
For one immersive week, teams were provided with workshops, mentoring and coaching to transfer their ideas into a business solution that offers an innovative product or service with high technological content. The aim was to provide solutions to challenges of national and international interest.
“The UAE is going towards a knowledge-based economy and the fuel for that economy is this youth,” said Dr Shawqi Kharbash, CEO of the UAEU Science and Innovation Park. “And these are great minds that we need to capitalize on and direct their efforts to serve that. One way to do that is to put them on a platform to take their initiatives, serving strategic sectors of the UAE which are of high priority, like water, IT and health.”
The students will take their idea and turn them into a real business to contribute to the present moment. “The challenge will help them ideate, validate their idea and try to see how it will fit as a business now,” Dr Kharbash said. “In this journey in one week, they will revisit their idea and see what impact they have, make a competitive analysis about their idea, find out who’s who in the market, and how they can contribute and compete with existing companies”
The purpose of the Challenge for Innovation was to provide participants with the knowledge and skills to write and pitch a business plan in one week. In addition, it helps develop participants’ skills and competences much needed for their professional fulfillment, such as problem solving, critical thinking, teamwork, autonomy, creativity, how to manage uncertainty and how to channel collective action in constrained optimization settings to achieve their own objectives, leadership and self-development.
“During this week, they will develop a very primitive prototype to demonstrate that their proposed product works,” he explained. “Then, they will learn a one-on-one financial perspective, define their revenue streams and try to come up with a real business model. They will have the tools to create the roadmap for success in their business.”
Teams from five universities in Asia, alongside UAEU students as part of the Asian Universities Alliances (AUA) activities, are provided with services to help them transform their ideas into businesses, build their business models and prepare compelling pitch decks. The UAEU is a founding member of the AUA.
“We have a structured program taking them step by step to learn the main aspects of sales, finance, branding, marketing and so on,” Dr Shawqi noted. “We have experts and mentors’ lectures as well as the facility helping them to build the prototype from a technological perspective. We are leveraging what we have from human capital to partners, and mentors who can give them the proper guidance and tools, so we have the perfect set up to launch their ideas.”
35 youth took part in the challenge, including 16 from five countries in Asia, such as Kazakhstan, Singapore, China, South Korea and Japan. Three winners were announced with the 1st place going to “TRust”, team of UAEU students, who have a developed a spray to prevent metal corrosion and which is extracted from palm trees waste which is abundantly available in Al-Ain and was the main driver for their idea which has undergone testing for over two months and has proved to be highly effective. 2nd place went to “ABACUS Tech Ltd”, a team from Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan, which is a company that will save billions of dollars for farmers using the latest technology in computer vision to process the damaged parts of the grass through cameras placed in the soil whilst 3rd place went to “Gloco”, a team from National University of Singapore which is a marketplace connecting expanding businesses to localized data through direct interviews.
The first three winners have been recognized while every participant received a certificate of completing the program. “For the UAEU students, they will have the opportunity to join our future program, called Idea to Prototype, which will launch on February 3,” he concluded.
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