King Abdul Aziz University (KAAU) announced Sunday the names of three winners of its “New Ideas for a Beautiful World” competition, which was organized by Business Incubators of Business and Knowledge Alliance at the University in cooperation with Zain mobile company. Dr. Zuhair Bin Abdullah Tayeb, chief executive of Business and Knowledge Alliance, said that the competition is the first of its kind organized by Business Incubators at KAAU in collaboration with a national company. “The competition aims to promote the concept of business incubators, and to encourage university students and graduates to start their own small projects based on new and distinctive ideas,” Tayeb said. He said that more than 150 male and female students submitted their ideas in the field of communications technology, though all ideas were of very high levels, only 60 of them met the criteria and conditions of the competition. “Some 20 best ideas were selected in the first qualification phase. Out of them three ideas selected in the second phase as winners of the first three places, will get SR50,000 from the sponsoring company, as well as the adoption of their distinctive ideas and funding them to turn them into projects that benefit the community,” Tayeb also added. The winners were, Inas Fawzi Khairallah, M.C.S., and Abdullah Mohammed Abdullah Khamis, M.C.S. and Khalid Adnan Johary, bachelor of nuclear engineering. Speaking on the occasion, Dr. Ahmed Bin Hamed Naqadi, the Undersecretary of Business and Innovative Knowledge, expressed the appreciation of KAAU to the mobile company for its initiative to sponsor the competition. He praised the idea of the competition and its contribution in discovering excellent ideas of the students and university graduates, as well as opening doors for the participants to get support and assistance to start their own businesses. – SG He further said that the competition comes in the general framework of KAAU plans to widespread knowledge innovation among its students and assist them to use modern technologies in generating new work ideas, in order to prepare them to shoulder their responsibilities in an era of science and knowledge. For his part, Mohammed Ismail Fikri, chief operating officer in Zain, ascertained that sponsoring of the competition comes within their corporate social responsibility toward the development of the community they belong to and for the interest of its members. Fikri praised the high level of ideas submitted to the competition and said that they reflect the high scientific level of students and graduates of KAAU. Engineer Suhail Bin Hassan Sarbaya, director of Business Incubators, explained that the competition included four categories, namely, the uses of mobile phone technology in education applications, usages of mobile phone technology in Haj and Umrah applications, machine-to-machine applications and uses of mobile phone technology in social networks applications. He said that this competition provides a positive environment to embrace investment and business innovative ideas of students and graduates of the university. – SG “It also supports the incubated ideas until they become reality and help produce dependent people to find business opportunities for themselves and for others. In addition, it can help raise awareness among students and graduates on the importance of small- and medium-sized business sectors, and to grant them the opportunity to benefit from the services of Business Incubators in training and on how to prepare feasibility studies,” Sarbaya added. __
