Ooredoo announced that it recently held an awards ceremony to celebrate the winning teams of its first intrapreneurship programme, Al Mostaqbal. The ceremony was held at the Ooredoo headquarters in the presence of several senior representatives from Ooredoo, Qatar Development Bank and Qatar Business Incubation Centre (QBIC).
The Al Mostaqbal intrapreneurship programme encouraged Ooredoo employees to think outside the box and go the extra mile to benefit the company and its customers, in order to foster an atmosphere of creativity and innovation in which employees feel motivated to explore their ideas and turn them into reality, the company said in a statement.
Designed in collaboration with QBIC, the programme invited "any and all staff to submit ideas that would solve problems for either Ooredoo or its customers".
From the many ideas that were submitted, and many teams that were formed to work on those ideas, five teams pitched their ideas to a Final Demo Day Committee, which selected two of these ideas to move forward to the Activation stage.
The winning teams will be working on two solutions: Qatar Services Public Cloud and Precision Ponics for Smart Agriculture. Both teams demonstrated their solutions at the awards ceremony.
The two winning teams will now be diverted from their official Ooredoo posts to concentrate on developing their ideas while still being paid, and will also be supported with dedicated office space and equipment, seed funding of QR200,000 per team based on agreed milestones, and access to mentoring and coaching, the statement explains.
Yousuf Abdulla al-Kubaisi – chief operating officer at Ooredoo – said: “We were absolutely delighted with the response to the first edition of our Al Mostaqbal programme. We know some of the most prominent innovations of today – the 'Like' button on Facebook, Gmail, the MacBook – came about as the result of intrapreneurship programmes, and we also know we have a phenomenal pool of talent within our staff, so it made perfect
sense for us to establish our own intrapreneurship programme.
"We’ve seen some incredible ideas and some incredible innovation, and look forward to seeing the chosen ideas being developed by the winning teams in the next few months.”
