A total of 23 entrepreneurs in Qatar will soon hit the halfway milestone in Qatar Science and Technology Park’s acclaimed Technology Innovation and Entrepreneurship Program (TIEP) – one of the most rigorous programs helping technology entrepreneurs understand commercial strategies and break into the region’s rapidly emerging start-up scene.

TIEP participants have wrapped up the first module of the program, focusing on Technology Analysis, and are pushing ahead with the second of four.

The Technology Analysis module saw two fast-paced, high energy workshops from both local and international leaders in the field.

The current module, Market Analysis, started in January and teaches the fundamentals of mapping market structure and dynamics and understanding precisely how an idea or innovative technology project can be positioned in the market. Participants have been in the field speaking with potential customers to determine how well their ideas and models satisfy unmet market needs.

Already the 2013-2014 cohort of TIEP welcomed special lectures by Christina Chase from Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) famed Sloan School of Management and serial entrepreneur Dr Maher Hakim, who spent two decades in the San Francisco Bay area and now teaches at Carnegie Mellon University Qatar.  

TIEP’s faculty of practitioners, diverse student profile, cutting-edge tools and methodologies, and focus on developing real-world projects set it apart from other programs and have earned it acclaim as it enters its fifth year.

Projects anchor TIEP coursework, giving students the opportunity to hone their skills on advanced stage, real world technologies being evaluated for their commercial viability.

This year’s projects include: a spray vaccine for a disease afflicting the global poultry industry, minimally-invasive robotic surgery programs, nanoparticle-based diagnostic tests for serious infections, and voltage balancing converters for solar energy systems.   Each project has been awarded a National Priorities Research Program Cycle 4 Grant by the Qatar National Research Fund, linking TIEP to Qatar's wider entrepreneurial ecosystem and ensuring coursework is valuable and applicable beyond the classroom.

A total of 18 private and public sector organizations are represented in the 2013-2014 TIEP cohort, including employees from Shell, Hamad Medical Corporation, Msheireb Properties, RasGas, Aspetar, and Texas A&M Qatar.

“Building the right skills is an essential ingredient in Qatar’s economic diversification and growing our capacity to create economic value from knowledge,” said Hamad Al-Kuwari, the QSTP managing director.

 “The rigorous and practical TIEP program continues to be a bright spot in Qatar’s entrepreneurial ecosystem, empowering some of Qatar’s sharpest minds in academia, industry and government with the skills needed to make a splash in the commercial marketplace. Few programs dive as deep as TIEP to spur real understanding of technology assessment  while offering access to some  successful entrepreneurial minds from the region. We are proud to see TIEP reach new heights each year since its inception,” he added.-TradeArabia News Service