Noah’s Ark is a unique Iraqi initiative to alleviate unemployment among youth by institutionalizing youth entrepreneurship. At Noah’s Ark, we have plans to establish Specialized Incubators dedicated to specific tasks as follows:
- Developing project blueprints for highly viable projects that are well analyzed technically, operationally, and economically. These project blueprints are to be made available to individual (or teams) entrepreneurs to execute in their own geographies.
- The incubator should be focused on a specific Iraqi problem.
- Provide ongoing support for the implemented projects by finding solutions and workarounds for all issues and problems arising when the projects are executed.
Each Specialized Incubator comprises a team overseeing the incubator. The teams are made up of professional experts, scientists, managers, mentors, and investors. This team of high calibre people will be recruited from inside and outside Iraq. Noah’s Ark will allocate appropriate number of resources to administer the incubator’s operations on the Ark. So far, we are planning the following Specialized Incubators:
Agricultural Incubator: To work on creating blueprints for a variety of model farms that deploys the latest in farming science and technology to ensure highly competitive farm produce and products. The blueprints are aimed at graduate farmers.
River Transportation and Tourism: Dedicated to designing and developing a family of river boats suitable for transportation of particularly agricultural produce as well as variations for serving tourism as floating hotel rooms. The incubator team will work on designing the boats, oversee their manufacture, develop financial schemes for entrepreneurs to own their boats, then provide applications for online bookings and navigation scheduling. The incubator aims to solve the problems of distribution of agricultural products and to encourage river based tourism, particularly in underdeveloped regions of Iraq such as the marshes.
3D Printed Buildings Incubator: Dedicated to establishing a blueprint for projects whereby small numbers of graduates from varying disciplines join to form a team. Each team acquires a set of building equipment (printer, cement mixer, grinder) and either use readily available housing unit designs or create their own designs. The teams are trained on using the technology prior to engaging in actual projects. The incubator aims to rebuild Iraqi war torn cities at 1/10th of the time and 1/3rd of the cost of conventional building methods. After rebuilding those cities, these teams of graduates can work on solving Iraq’s 2.5m shortage in housing units, ultimately becoming world experts in rebuilding war or natural disaster hit cities.
Women Incubator: Unlike other specialized incubators, there is no focus in this incubator on creating specific project blueprints. It is focused on the women owning and leading their startups. It is felt this focus is needed due to the suffering of Iraqi women in almost all aspects of life endeavours in Iraq. More so in entrepreneurship. The all women team overseeing this incubator are from different backgrounds and experiences.
Crafts Incubator: This incubator is dedicated to all crafts, both traditional and modern. It builds blueprints of projects for every type of craft providing technical knowhow, research, business viability analysis, and marketing initiatives (e.g. bazaar events). One aspect of the incubator work shall be to work on re-establishing extinct crafts. The overseeing team needs to include experts, practitioners, environmentalists, artists and marketers.
All those with the necessary knowledge and experience in any of the above topics are invited to apply to join the incubator overseeing teams. Please note that this work is voluntary and may require online interactions for 1-2 hours weekly (according to your circumstances and desire to rebuild Iraq!). All these incubators will work through Noah’s Ark. Therefore all candidates need to be registered members. Once signed up, please use the “Contact Us” basic form to apply for these incubators. The door is open for suggesting new incubators to add to the above list. Any suggested new incubator topic should be capable of being developed as project blueprints suitable for youth entrepreneurs to implement.
Noah’s Ark – http://noah-ark.org
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