Oman’s innovation system wins Best Arab Government Project Award

Oman’s innovation system wins Best Arab Government Project Award

Muscat: The Best Arab Government Project for development of education, in the first edition of the Arab Government Excellence Award, was won by Oman's innovation system aimed at students of higher education institutions.This award is instituted under the supervision of the Arab Organisation for Administrative Development in the League of Arab States, and Oman was selected out of five thousand government applications from various Arab countries.The innovation system aims to support innovation through an integrated environment that will support competitions among innovators, provide incentive benefits in order to protect intellectual property rights, encourage the use of technology,find supportive bodies, and establish new start-up companies based on innovations with added value to the national economy.The innovation system, which was launched by the Ministry of Manpower, aimed to support the higher education sector represented by the technical and vocational colleges through an open data portal linked to the Sultanate's digital transformation strategies and the National Innovation Strategy.An online portal has been designed to provide services to beneficiaries, bringing the number of beneficiaries to 174,000 beneficiaries. The portal includes an open data hackathon, an innovation acceleration programme, an innovation lab and an innovation registration service, which includes 104 ideas aimed at enhancing students'