75 projects qualified for the second stage of the annual Taibah innovates competition launched by Taibah University in its fourth edition, targeting innovators, entrepreneurs, startups and the community to encourage innovation and entrepreneurship.

The “Tiba Innovates 4” competition embraces several areas, including Hajj and Umrah, palm trees, dates, smart cities, health applications, e-learning, e-commerce and post-Covid 19 innovations, and the value of its prizes is 300,000 riyals distributed among five winners. Executives of the largest specialized companies in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, in addition to specialized training in leading international companies in various fields and emerging technologies, intensive training on innovation and entrepreneurship, investment support by communicating with industry partners and investors, identifying investment opportunities available in the market, and providing laboratory and engineering infrastructure to develop Products using modern technologies and follow-up and support the growth of the emerging company.

The stage of the training camp, which began during the period from January 31 to March 25, 2021, is considered the second stage of the competition, in which innovative projects were launched to build prototypes to become innovative products and projects. In its fourth season, 521 male and female contestants submitted to the competition, 41% of whom were females and 59% were males, 188 of whom submitted 57% of projects are ideas, 19% are prototypes, 7% are startups, and 17% are graduation projects, of which 75% are qualified for the bootcamp stage. 75 projects are 67% female and 33% male, of which 25% of the qualified projects were ideas, 59% are prototypes, and 10% are startups. And 6% is a graduation project. While the number of advisory sessions reached 160, including 13 sessions in the Internet of Things, 23 sessions in artificial intelligence, three sessions in blockchain technology, 42 sessions for innovation and startups, 34 sessions for intellectual property, 24 sessions in the financial field, and 21 sessions in the legal field.

The Department of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the University Vice Presidency for Business and Knowledge Creativity is the main driver of projects and activities that link the internal environment of the university with the community and networks of researchers, thus providing different and new services and developing products while supporting emerging companies using new technologies that include an incubator and business accelerator linked to modern technical laboratories and laboratories as well as facilitating Access to emerging technologies, training workshops, intellectual property rights protection services, technical, commercial and guidance consulting services, and complementary services to other innovation centers and contribution to the provision of financial and investment support and sponsorship of talented people.