Zain Group, one of Middle East’s largest telecom companies, has promised full strategic and financial support to three new startup initiatives conceived using Zainiac, a dedicated e-platform set up by the telecom giant to propagate its innovative internal ideas.
Since its foundation in late 2017, Zainiac has received more than 300 initiatives and proposals, all of which were carefully examined by the platform to ensure that the pitched ideas can promote internal innovations and lead to the birth of new businesses. Zainiac accepted the three new initiatives after subjecting them through the due pitching process overseen by Zain Group’s CEO and Vice-Chairman Bader Al-Kharafi.
Commenting on the potential of these new startups, Al-Kharafi said: “This generation of successful innovative ideas will become one of the greatest differentiators between societies that progress into the future. We are very clear in our view that for Zain to remain innovative and competitive, we need to generate ideas from wherever we can find them and seeking them out internally is one of many prudent options we undertake.”
The first initiative, dubbed Farhetna, was pitched by Ali Zreik from Zain’s managed operation in Lebanon. It aims to help newly-wed couples and their wedding guests to seamlessly collect the gift and money paid towards the wedding using Zain’s online and offline channels.
The second initiative came from Bahrain. Proposed by Abdullah Dashti, a budding innovator, it aims to launch a new web-based bilingual educational platform to help students across the region to search for and apply in different academic institutes in a much more accessible and affordable manner.
Abdullah Abu-Karaki and Talal Al Turk from Jordan pitched the third idea dubbed ZGiving. Simply put, this private initiative aims to set up a robust mechanism within Zain to help fund needy employees with donations from colleagues and the management (through a native app).
