NEWS
The University of Bahrain Business Incubator Organizes the Innovation Challenge for University Students
Sakhir – University of Bahrain (Khadijah Abdusalem)
December 28, 2022
Director of the Business Incubator Center at the University of Bahrain, Dr. Israa Ahmed Wali, stressed the importance of youth participation in creating innovative ideas and systems based on scientific foundations, and finding solutions to solve problems in creative ways to face food security challenges.
In this context, the Business Incubator Center organized the event of “Innovation Challenge” online, in collaboration with the “ Impactique” company, on 13-17 November 2022, with the participation of students from the university’s various colleges.
15 male and female students did fast-paced activities and tasks for 5 days, to come up with innovative ideas to solve food security challenges. The students were also introduced to the concept of exponential organizations, as this methodology was used in the challenge. The exponential organization calls for taking advantage of accelerating technologies so that it can grow faster, larger, and cheaper than its competitors.
The participating students presented several ideas for projects to solve food security challenges, including an application for collecting food leftovers to be recycled into other materials such as organic fertilizers. Students also presented technical solutions for managing the supply chain in food markets, as well as technical solutions for the development of agriculture in Bahrain.
The students worked within multiple groups of the disciplines of engineering, business administration, and information technology, through which they presented their innovative ideas on the last day of the challenge. Students will continue to work on and develop these ideas.
The challenge was supervised by Sahar Al-Baharna, innovation coach and CEO of Impactique. Al-Baharna stressed the importance of promoting innovation and entrepreneurship at the university level to prepare students for the new labor market requirements.
It is worthy to note that the Innovation Coach, Sahar Al Baharna, has experience in working with startups and organizations to help them devise and implement scalable solutions for real-world problems. She is also interested in creating positive change by using innovation and technology to co-create exponential solutions. She has experience in several industries, including digital payments, construction, higher education and education technology, corporate learning, food security and agricultural technology.
