Building an Ecosystem for Innovation & Entrepreneurship

2024 Issue No. 2

At AUB lives all the talent, know-how, and drive to host a robust environment for innovation and entrepreneurship. But it takes time, as well as monumental support and experience, for all the components to come together. Campus initiatives focused on innovation and entrepreneurship have grown over the last 15 years, overlapping, collaborating, and getting buffeted by the challenges in Lebanon but also identifying niches and finding success. Today, these programs are coming together to build that integrated entrepreneurial environment.

“As biologists say, we are moving out of the fledgling landscape stage,” says Professor Bijan Azad, director of the Darwazah Center for Innovation Management and Entrepreneurship. “We are not 100 percent integrated, but we’re moving toward being that vibrant, thriving ecosystem.” His hands sketch an illustration in the air. “When most of the ‘fauna and flora’ have evolved to become an ecosystem, that will promote economic development in an effective way.”

Yousif Asfour, AUB’s chief innovation and transformation officer and executive director at the Talal and Madiha Zein AUB-Innovation Park (iPark), tries to articulate the AUB difference. “We are about educating people not just to get jobs but to create them. We want to develop leaders who can help build the economic ecosystem of Lebanon and then further build the economy of the entire region. The AUB culture can be an advantage. When resources are limited, you can sit in the corner and cry, or you can say, ‘No, I will make a difference.’ Instead of being defeated by the challenges, successful teams improvise.”

“We have the advantage of tremendous intellectual wealth,” says Maha Zouwayhed, associate director at Zein AUB iPark, who works with dozens of aspiring entrepreneurs in the AUB ecosystem. “Our people are cultured, multilingual, and cosmopolitan. They are skilled, smart, and ready to plug and play. For finding feasible solutions for real problems, we are the ‘dudes.’”

Darwazah Center for Innovation Management & Entrepreneurship at the Suliman S. Olayan School of Business (OSB)

Founded in 2011, the Darwazah Center (DC) works with startups at all stages, including established small businesses. Azad knows the daunting fact that even after surviving the odds of being able to launch, 80 percent of small businesses will fail within the first five years. These companies, which he calls “the poor cousins” (no longer in the initial funding stage but not big enough to thrive) make up 92 percent of businesses in Lebanon, and the DC is determined to help them through the “Valley of Death.” The valley is where the visionary entrepreneur typically can no longer succeed on the skills that launched him or her and now needs the added help of separate manager and technician roles. It’s where the owner needs to let go of having complete control and face the challenge of scaling up with a functioning team.

The AUB-SPARK Scaling-up of Startups (SSS) Program, in partnership with the DC, gives small businesses “a mini-MBA in 16 weeks,” Azad says. “We give the entrepreneurs the tools to diagnose why they have stalled and how to devise the plan for moving forward. They gain the capacity to analyze their own marketing, sales, management, budgeting, and fulfillment and see how to fix what’s not working. A lot of businesses in our region are family businesses, skeptical of ‘letting go’ in order to grow. Some have gone flat as far as growth and revenue, and these are the businesses we can help.”

TALAL AND MADIHA ZEIN AUB-INNOVATION PARK

The Zein AUB iPark helps startup teams bridge the gap between academia and investment and commercialization. Teams with at least one founder connected to AUB face the commercial world, competing for precious resources to bring their ideas to market. The iPark is only four years old and operates with only five staff members, “yet we’re already leading in Lebanon in terms of education and entrepreneurship,” says Asfour. “Others are ahead of us in acceleration and incubation, but we are catching up and have a good reputation, especially in the health sciences sector.”

In 2023, Zein AUB iPark sent three promising startups to a five-week accelerator program at Draper University in California, where Fixalign, a dental startup, placed in the top 5 out of 95 teams.

Most recently, the AUB Mediterraneo Innovation Center was launched in collaboration with the Municipality of Pafos in Cyprus. It will host startups from the Zein AUB iPark in Beirut, including three that have entered the growth stage of their business journey: two in the energy sector and one in AgriTech. With this opportunity, the startups gain access to workspaces, mentorship, and network connections, giving them access to the European market and investors.

SOME ACTUAL INNOVATIONS…

Far from an exhaustive list, which would take up far more than this whole magazine, what follow are a few examples of innovations, startups, and projects being realized as a result of AUB’s entrepreneurial and innovation ecosystem. The GHATA Project In 2013, eager to help refugees have a viable learning environment, MSFEA students designed the first GHATA unit, a portable shelter to be used as a classroom. A year later, the GHATA unit was patented by AUB and granted a decree to be used for educational purposes, eventually earning accreditation by the Lebanese Ministry of Education. GHATA units are still in use, able to endure severe weather conditions and having a lifespan of between 10 and 15 years. The invention has since been scaled up across the country.

Mobile Antenna The invention, codeveloped by Maria Sakovsky, an aerospace engineer at Stanford University, and Joseph Costantine, electrical and computer engineer at AUB, is a lightweight, collapsible helix antenna making communication possible in difficult environments such as disaster or conflict zones. It is portable and can communicate with either satellites or terrestrial devices. The researchers used shapes that have never been used on a helical antenna before. The innovation makes it ideally suited for scenarios where infrastructure is damaged and impromptu communication is urgent. Sakovsky says the device’s light construction will also make it conducive for deployment in space.

Cancer CHIP
The Arab Research & Innovation Co-Funded Alliances recently accepted research from the lab of Dr. Massoud Khraiche in AUB’s Biomedical Engineering Program and ranked it 11th out of 500 submissions. The research focuses on early-cancer-detection chip technology. Dr. Khraiche’s team has developed a way of utilizing the mechanical properties of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) to enhance detection and characterization.

DLOC Biosystems
This company, now operating out of the UK, spun off from a research project in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at AUB on breast cancer metastasis in mammary ducts. That led to new methods and tools in tissue culture that provided the seeds from which DLOC’s technology evolved. In its early days, the startup was incubated at the Darwazah Center. DLOC then went on to secure $1.2 million in funding after winning multiple local and international entrepreneurship competitions, including the Stars of Science innovation contest. With this funding, DLOC significantly improved, tested, validated, and patented its technology, looking to launch its Series A fundraising round.

Bokja
Gladys Abou Diwan Saliba, managing director at Bokja, found the help she needed at the AUB-SPARK Scaling-up of Startups (SSS) Program in partnership with the Darwazah Center. Bokja is a design studio in Beirut that represents a diversity of textile crafts in the Arab region. Saliba soaked up the mentorship in marketing strategy and branding in order to scale up Bokja’s business. At her graduation from the program, she thanked the Darwazah and AUB-SPARK teams for providing tools for her to do her job better. “Thank you,” she said, “for teaching us how to fish instead of giving us the fish.”