UNESCO Commercially Viable Technologies (CVTs) Initiative
A UNESCO initiative to call upon the Universities to act as Agents of Change in the area of Entrepreneurship and to build the Venture Capitalists Trust (VCT) at an early stage regarding the funding of a specific product and/or process.
Entrepreneurship in Arab states: an explosive sector still under construction
Entrepreneurship, as an engine of economic growth, is related to a combination of several determinants such as education levels, business climate and legal and political conditions. An entrepreneurial ecosystem is a dynamic institutionally embedded interaction between entrepreneurial attitudes, abilities and aspirations, by individuals, which drives the allocation of resources towards the creation of wealth and operation of new ventures. But while Entrepreneurship is an action undertaken and driven by agents on the basis of incentives, the individual actions are affected by an institutional framework for entrepreneurship.
Many entrepreneurs say: “What needs to be improved in the Arab region is governments’ involvement in fostering entrepreneurship”. Governments across the Arab world have been spending money on consultants to set up incubators and other tools to help those with business ideas create new firms and scale them up, as more private sector jobs will be needed to provide employment for a young and fast-growing population.
The questions now are: how successful are these government-supported businesses and what are conditions like for those brave souls who take a plunge and quit their jobs to start their own businesses? Are there enough opportunities? How hard is the journey and which track should the Arab entrepreneurs take to achieve their goals?
The emergence of incubators
More and more governmental entities, corporations, and individuals believe in the potential of entrepreneurship to improve economies in the Arab world, and open structures to help entrepreneurs turn their projects into full-fledged companies. Among those structures are incubators.
Incubators are organizations whose aim is to accelerate the growth and success of entrepreneurial companies through an array of support resources and services that could include physical space, capital/seed money, coaching, common services, and networking connections, as defined by the International Association of Scientific Parks (IASP). But they are not to be confused with accelerators or business incubators. Also incubators should not be confused with research and technology parks, which house large-scale projects developed by corporate, government, university labs, or SMEs and do not offer business assistance services.
Pre-incubators are at the stage just before incubation, where the following services are rendered:
- Effective product application and screening process
- Appealing incubator’s environment and culture
- Choice and range of incubator units to match needs
- Coaching, mentoring, and training counseling take place and hence connection and networking with relevant mentors
Venture capital firms offer better options for entrepreneurs who have already turned their ideas into a firm business model and are working towards growing the business. So, how can we change that to make VCs attend more to entrepreneurs who have not reached that level yet?
Because of this gap for early businesses, pre-incubation is seen as an important step towards high rates of entrepreneurial success. It is the critical stage at which an entrepreneur can move from owning a prototype product to judging its commercial viability with the help of experts in the field. If the answer is yes, expert knowledge will be able to develop or adapt that product at a volume and cost that will enable them to capture a significant share of an identified market.
Universities to bridge the gap and support early businesses while investing in scientific research
The UNESCO CVTs Initiative calls upon utilizing the universities to build the Venture Capitalists Trust (VCT) at an early stage regarding a specific product/process during pre-incubation. In other words, universities can take innovative ideas through to commercial viability by creating pre-incubators within faculties.
Indeed, pre-incubation could be easily offered to student entrepreneurs by universities, which could propose the following services:
- The Experts Knowledge sources (R&D, academia, and more) within the country & abroad
- Design & Engineering, Legal Services & Consultants
- Equipment Manufacturers
- Testing & certification, training patent offices
- Participation in exhibitions and trade fairs
What kind of early businesses and innovative ideas are we thinking about? Graduation projects! Every year, around a hundred graduation projects are drawn up by students in each science faculties of all the universities in the Arab region. Most of them are left to the student project stage, and we miss out on some wonderful innovations. We can no longer allow these graduation projects to be abandoned.
In the Arab region, the effect of adopting such an initiative will be a huge increase in the number of incubators and hence a possible substantial flow of innovative products and technical processes. This can easily translate into spin-off companies and hence a serious cash flow to support scientific research in these universities. This could also translate into a steady stream of Commercially Viable Technologies (CVTs).
| A phenomenal increase in the number of pre-incubators in the Arab region 280 universities x 6 colleges (science, engineering, medicine, pharmacology, agriculture, veterinary) x 6 (average number of divisions with each college) = 10,080 new pre-incubators With an average annual total of pre-selected graduation projects of 100-150 in each faculty/division in each of these 280 universities, you can imagine the explosion of new knowledge and innovative business! |
In the long run, pre-incubators in the same field can combine their strengths to produce a series of innovations and start-ups to fund further research in these faculties. We, therefore, invite all the universities in the MENA region to adopt this initiative and become a substantial source of employment for the region’s higher education graduates.
Do your faculty want to be part of the initiative?
Please write the UNESCO Arab science podium at the following address to be added to the list of partner faculties and universities and receive support in developing your pre-incubator: info@unescoarabsciencepodium.org