OREANDA-NEWS. December 31, 2014. The Saudi Aramco Entrepreneurship Center has pledged to help the Kingdom diversify its economy. This pledge is beginning to take shape as they train Saudi university graduates on how to use their innovative ideas to become future entrepreneurs and business leaders.

The Entrepreneurship Center’s Co-op-to-Entrepreneur (C2E) program helps Saudi entrepreneurs take their ideas to the marketplace, an effort that will help in the creation of small- and medium-sized enterprises. This will increase the number of companies that can create jobs for Saudi Arabia’s growing young workforce while giving Saudi graduates a new range of options that  allow them to shift from becoming job seekers to job creators.

On the campus of King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM), the C2E program provides a classroom setting where university students from across the Kingdom receive help in incubating groundbreaking business ideas in the StartUp Lab.

Some students have managed to move quickly from mere business proposals to cash-positive companies within the 10-week C2E program.

“There are two programs here,” said Ted Randall, manager of the StartUp Lab. “One is a business incubator where entrepreneurs come in with an idea, and we provide them with office space, computer hardware and software, special coaching and mentoring, financial planning and even seed funding to help them launch their ideas.

“The second is the C2E program, a 10-week course for taking co-op students and putting them into an intense accelerator course,” Randall said. “The idea is to have a business ready to launch by the end of the course.”

The most recent class, composed of 12 students from KFUPM, King Saud University and Jazan University, generated three startups, one of which continues to operate as a cash-positive business.

Another startup that has made it through the incubation process and is ready to launch is Waki. Founded three months ago by a trio of students from KFUPM — Abdulaziz Alzahrani, Osama Al-Najjat and Ali Busaleh — Waki is a Web-based reservation service for private soccer fields. In the past, athletes taped their names and phone numbers on the gates of soccer fields to reserve them. Now, through Waki, they can reserve fields online. Waki has handled 7,000 reservations at KFUPM as they developed and improved their concept and is being launched to the public.

Mohammed Al-Hashim is another C2E student who formed a company, and that company is already generating revenue. Founder of GyptechIT, an IT firm that installs and manages security camera systems for companies as well as providing IT support, Al-Hashim says that he started out with nothing but an idea.

“Saudi Aramco’s C2E program took me from zero and provided me with training on the business side and incubated us for a time so that we were able to generate revenue and become more organized and do our business in a more innovative way,” Al-Hashim said.

He said that the hardest part for him, as a software engineer, was to figure out how to market his product and how to let businesses know what his company could do for them. C2E facilitators helped him get in touch with a Riyadh-based tech business owner, who gave him useful advice on how to handle marketing.

The StartUp Lab and its C2E program is just one of the Saudi Aramco Entrepreneurship Center initiatives to supporting growth and diversity in the Kingdom. For more information, go to www.waed.net.