King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST), represented by Badir technology incubator, in partnership with Intel, launched recently the National Technology Entrepreneurship Challenge (NTEC) in its second year, which aims to support innovative technology projects and encourage technical creativity in students. The challenge provides the opportunity to represent the Kingdom at Intel Global Challenge at the University of California, Berkeley, US. Last year, NTEC reached out to over 3,000 young Saudi innovators and entrepreneurs from various fields of technology in the Kingdom. This year the event hopes to reach 50,000 students and encourage them to register their ideas. Once the students have registered, they are given the opportunity to engage in extensive mentoring and training programs run by a large group of experts in their field, and provided weekly by Potential, a leading company in business development. This will help give them the modern tools, develop their technical skills and enable them to prepare business plans to turn their ideas into successful commercial projects. Nawaf Al-Sahaf, CEO of Badir incubators at KACST, said: “National Technology Entrepreneurship Challenge is one of the most important initiatives Badir has launched to support technology entrepreneurship in the Kingdom. The challenge offers the perfect environment for Saudi's young entrepreneurs to develop their entrepreneurial ideas in all the different science and technology domains including Information Technology, Communications, Electronics, Energy Technology, Water, Industry, Medicine and Environment. It enables the young entrepreneurs to transform their ideas into successful investment projects which can eventually contribute to diversifying income sources and creating work opportunities for the Saudi youth”. Eng. Abdulaziz AlNogaiher, General Manager of Intel KSA, said: “We are very proud to be part of the prestigious National Technology Entrepreneurship Challenge. NTEC feeds into the well-established Intel Global Challenge which provides the opportunity for young Saudis to represent the Kingdom on the World stage and benefit from the expertise of Silicon Valley's worldwide entrepreneurial leaders. At Intel we believe it is very important to encourage an entrepreneurial spirit in the technology field, for the Saudi youth of today and the future of the Kingdom. This will fuel productivity, enable the development of new products and services, and a stronger knowledge economy for Saudi Arabia. We have noticed big potential and promising opportunities from the participants of last year's challenge.” Turki Fahad, team leader and founder of Edintity, first place winner from NTEC 2012, shared his experience: “Through NTEC, I learned how to move from drafting an idea to a functional project, and consider the importance of teamwork and a business model in order to succeed.” — SG
