The senior management of Badir Program for Technology Incubators and Accelerators, one of the leading programs of King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology, has successfully completed an international certification program conducted by InBIA, a global non-profit organization with over 2,500 members in 62 countries.
The Entrepreneurship Center and Incubator Management (ECM) Certificate Program is a globally recognized training program that provides up-to-date, foundational knowledge for entrepreneurship and incubation professionals in order to build sustainable programming within their local regions. InBIA has certified over 3,000 professionals in entrepreneurship and incubation management.
A total of 36 Badir Program employees, including the CEO, incubator and accelerator directors, incubator regional managers, incubator managers, accelerator managers and business development managers took part in the certification program, which were held in four main regions, including eight cities – Riyadh, Qassim, Dammam, Jubail, Jeddah, Madinah, Taif and Abha.
The ECA certificate program was conducted by InBIA’s interim CEO Charles Ross, who came from the United States. He was joined by two InBIA certified trainers, Thea Chase and Tom Strodtbeck, who are the founders of the InBIA certificate programs and have a combined experience of over 40 years in the business incubation industry.
Commenting on the successful completion of the certification program, Nawaf Al Sahhaf commented: “The ECM and Incubation training program will enable Badir Program employees’ to learn best practices, so they are successful in diversifying the revenues as well as learn to be operationally efficient. We are proud to say that this is the first time that an entire organization has made such an unprecedented effort to provide the training course sequentially to their entire management and business development staff. This certification, in turn, will enable the sustainability of the incubator and accelerator.”
Badir Program was established in 2007 to improve and support technical entrepreneurship throughout the Kingdom by helping the strategic policy applied in entrepreneurship and incubators in collaboration with government agencies, universities and the private sector.