Initiated back in 2011, Enterprise Qatar's Al Fikra Business Plan Competition sought "to encourage entrepreneurship amongst young people, and to help foster an entrepreneurship culture in Qatar". Each year, the competition has been drawing more and more participants across various age groups and nationalities with a wide range of business ideas in addition to established start-ups. This year the competition attracted 127 business ideas, 69 of which were converted into business plans and shortlisted for evaluation, in both the professional and the student categories. A few weeks, several business plan writing and financial statement analysis workshops and two entrepreneurship workshops later, the participants were asked to pitch their business ideas to the panel of judges, who then selected three winners from each of the categories. It is interesting to note that all three of the professional category winners were technology-based businesses. In fact, Enterprise Qatar says that 39% of the semi-finalists had ideas and businesses that centered around technology. In line with the aim "to build social and professional skills amongst the participants through the types of workshops and activities offered throughout the course of the competition and teach the participants how to develop professional business plans", all winners are eligible to receive Enterprise Qatar's Managerial and Technical Advisory Services (MTAS) at highly subsidised rates, in addition to the prize money. "We work very closely with start-up and growth entrepreneurs, and have found that while red tape is a challenge (we are in contact with the relevant ministries over the issue of red tape), for many people looking to start a company the biggest obstacles are financing and developing the skills needed to run a company," according to Enterprise Qatar. Brushing aside apologies for making him wait, Nebil Ben Aissa says "I never 'wait'. I am always on my laptop, working." When he started QPay Corporation 18 months ago, he realised his company was poised in that precarious juncture between finance and technology - the Qatari government handles the former with kid gloves and the latter with relative indifference. "An idea like PayPal could have never been born in this region. The government is careful to the extent of paranoia about money and requires you to get many specific licences. That makes it harder for the financial industry here to be innovative, even if it requires just importing an idea from overseas, because making it fit within the government framework is not easy.
After spending almost 20 years working in the technology sector in Chicago, building several companies including EPay (which he then sold for close to $50 million), Aissa has had to rethink his strategy in Qatar. "In the US, you are innocent until you are proven guilty," he laughs. And yet the opportunity he saw in the region was real and difficult to ignore. "It's viable only for large banks to maintain their own electronic payment processing servers and systems, so a lot of small to mid-sized banks tend to outsource this. I knew Qatar wasn't big enough a market for us; however the idea was to start up here and then export our services to other GCC countries," he says. With e-payment becoming widely popular and hard cash disappearing fast even from microtransactions, Aissa was eager to step in to fill the void. But tech firms don't have it particularly easy in Qatar (and he maintains QPay is one, despite Qatar Science and Technology Park refusing to let him set up in their premises, telling him QPay "wasn't tech enough"). "A tech eco-system like Internet City or Silicon Oasis doesn't exist in Qatar, and that's one of the reasons why I participated in Al Fikra, to be able to meet and connect with other tech entrepreneurs here. "Lenders here are very conservative and don't really understand service. Loans are easy enough to come by when your products are tangible, but if they are not, then be ready to fund your business from your own pocket," he says. For someone who has helped raise funds for several small tech companies through the venture capital firm he founded, such an environment is sure to be a damper. But still, he is quite happy with his progress and upbeat about the future. "We are still in the early stages and already have several small and mid-sized banks, financial institutions and exchange houses among our clients (who we can't name due to security reasons). We are still in the process of gaining traction and introducing new products and services," he says. Currently their services include prepaid card solutions for financial institutions, card fraud management and chargeback services, travel cards, internet shopping cards, e-commerce solutions for small and medium-sized enterprises, mobile payment via iPhone, Android, smart mobile phones and tablets, online bill pay, and more. "Eventually I see QPay operating along the lines of FIS and FDC, who currently service some of the biggest banks in the world." It was the plight of her young son struggling with his Arabic homework and moaning that he hated the language that put this computer engineering graduate on her current entrepreneurial path. "I had spent several years in the US and Canada before moving to Doha, and my husband grew up in the States and doesn't speak Arabic fluently. This made me super-conscious of the fact that my children could actually lose this language. And I love Arabic and appreciate it as a reflection of our identity and culture," Diana Al Dajani says. But her efforts to get her children to learn and like Arabic kept hitting a dead end till she discovered they learned faster, and voluntarily, through educational games. "I looked online for such games in Arabic and couldn't find any. Therefore, I programmed a game for him to help identify the letters. Soon my friends wanted to use it to teach their kids too, and the feedback was very encouraging," she remembers. Taking courage from a book called How to Think Like a CEO, and on the strength of her 10-year experience with online business development, Al Dajani took the plunge and launched the beta version of her site in late 2011. She still remembers that day: "I was in Canada for summer vacation, still vacillating on whether the business would work out or not. However, at 3 am (9 hours from when I needed to leave to the airport to go back to Qatar) I made a decision to register the company. I compiled all the necessary papers and went to the bank the very next morning to open a business account. Then I went back home, packed and headed back to Qatar." Now, with the help of five outsourced employees and several interns in Doha, who work on developing web applications, game platforms, game design, a user guide, marketing and sales, she is taking the fight to the battlefield - schools. "We started the process by addressing and further understanding the teachers' needs. Throughout the years we have conducted multiple focus groups and developed applications based on what we learnt," she says. At first, she wasn't going to apply for Al Fikra. "I thought my business was still at the very initial stages of my journey, and a lot of the questions had not yet been answered. However, when I realised that the competition was open to all and designed to help entrepreneurs such as myself with the process, I seized the opportunity and am very glad I did. It opened another door with MITEF (MIT Enterprise Forum), where I received a special award for the Best Female Entrepreneur in 2013. With her award money from Al Fikra being set aside for product development and marketing, Al Dajani hopes she'll be able to partner with the Supreme Education Council soon. "As for the five-year plan, I would love to see eduTechnoz further penetrate the GCC market and MENA region. Our ultimate goal is to become the preferred platform for learning Arabic."
