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Project You
Ideas take flight How Project You, a project by university students in the UAE, with support from Expo 2020 Dubai, turned into a fully-fledged startup by ABY SAM THOMAS
“INNOVATION CAN COME from anywhere, to everyone.” That’s the slogan emblazoned on the official website for Expo Live, the innovation and partnership program run by Expo 2020 Dubai, with an allocation of US$100 million to back social innovators from around the world, and that sentence alone is enough to understand the rationale for the creation of the Expo Live University Innovation Program (UIP). According to Fatma Ibrahim, Assistant Manager – Expo Live, Expo 2020 Dubai, UIP was launched in 2017 in response to the market demand for the same, which she got to witness first-hand with her team. “In 2016, Expo Live had just one initiative under its umbrella, the Innovation Impact Grant Program (IIGP), which
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targets small and mediumsized enterprises, innovators, government entities, and so on– people whose projects are at a relatively advanced level of maturity,” Ibrahim recalls. “They may already be part of the entrepreneurial ecosystem, or have a prototype, for example. [However,] the percentage of IIGP applications that we received from university students was significant; certainly high enough for us to take notice. Rather than rejecting these applications because the innovations were not sufficiently advanced, we decided to go out into the market to determine whether or not a gap existed. We talked to a number of universities in the UAE. We did not limit our discussions to public rather than private universities, or local rather than
international institutions. We spoke with educators from across the spectrum to better understand the programs that were already in the market, as well as what was missing. We built the UIP based on this exercise, so we don’t see it as our product. Instead, we view this program as the result of a team effort that was conducted in response to market demand.” Since its launch in September 2017, Expo Live UIP has supported 47 teams of students with their innovative undertakings, with them receiving AED50,000 each in funds to grow their enterprises, one of which was Project You, led by Emirates Aviation University students Hend Mahmoud Al Rais and Abdulmatheen Yousuf. Project You has been described
as “a platform that uses mentorship and guidance to help develop emotional intelligence and soft skills among high school students in the UAE,” and what’s particularly noteworthy about this endeavor is that while it may have started out as an idea of Al Rais and Yousuf, its passage through the Expo Live UIP has enabled it to become a fully-fledged business now- Project You recently received its trade license, and it is an officially registered company in Dubai today. As for what makes Project You so appealing as an enterprise, it can be drawn down to the founders’ thought process when building it up in the first place. “Abdulmatheen and I are young people who were educated here in the UAE,” Al Rais says. “We both realized that there were certain gaps that could be filled in terms of improving young people’s self-awareness and developing their soft skills. So, we asked ourselves how we could build a holistic and agile solution for this. Instead of just coming up with questions, why not try to solve the challenge? Why not share our collective experience with school students? That’s what Project You is all about.” Yousuf explains that Project You is conducted for students over the course of four weeks, Fatma Ibrahim, Assistant Manager, Expo Live
IMAGE COURTESY EXPO LIVE
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