Egypt’s TIEC, Etisalat launch Start-up initiative to support Egyptian youth

The Egyptian Technology Innovation and Entrepreneurship Centre (TIEC), in cooperation with UAE’s Etisalat, launched on Thursday ‘Start IT with Etisalat’.  The initiative aims to support Egyptian youth to build their own startup and turn their ideas into successful enterprises.

Start IT with Etisalat initiative comprises of different phases, where application submission was on May 18 –June 16, announcement of preliminarily accepted applicants will be on June 27, Interviews on June 29-July 6, announcement of winners on August 9, and incubation phase will be on 1 November 2016 – 31 August 2017.

The initiative focuses on products related to Internet of Things (IOT) or Big Data. There are six challenges under IOT and Big Data for interested applicants to choose from including gamification, smart electricity metre, fitness and healthcare, smart city, and smart silos.

The Project is concerned with new business startups that will be created and implemented in Egypt within a maximum of three months, following the selection of winners in the incubation phase. The Project is also concerned with a business that is less than one year old and is currently being developed in Egypt. Evaluation criteria depends on relevance to one of the announced Start IT with Etisalat initiative’s topics/challenges, skills, and expertise of the founding team, innovation, solving a real problem/new opportunity, commercialization potential and scalability.

TIEC was launched in 2010 to stimulate innovation and entrepreneurship in the ICT field in Egypt. The Centre aims to promote Egypt as an excellent global innovation competitor. It is the first centre of its kind in Egypt, the second in Africa and the fourth in the Middle East and Africa regions in terms of being a member accredited at the European Business and Innovation Centers Network (EBN).