The new initiative, which was announced at the concluding session of the Global Competitiveness Forum on Tuesday, will create an e-government portal integrating different government and non-governmental services in the Kingdom. The primary objective of the initiative is to make it easy for Saudi men and women entrepreneurs to start and develop their businesses.

The six entities of the proposed village would include government and non-governmental organizations such as the ministries of labor, commerce and industry and economy, and planning and non-governmental bodies such as King Abdulaziz College For Science and Technology(KACST), SAGIA and the Centennial Fund.

"It is a positive and very important step in converging the relevant bodies to harness their experience to help the entrepreneurs in the Kingdom," Abdul Aziz bin Ibrahim Al-Hargan, executive director of the Badir incubation program of the KACST, said on Saturday. He added that such a program would support the small and medium enterprises and the emerging business opportunities in the Kingdom. He pledged that KACST would give its utmost assistance to the successful operation of this project.

As for the KACST, Al-Hargan said that it could effectively help the proposed project with its latest Badir technology at the KACST. "We can create an effective communication and interaction with entrepreneurs, assess their performance and identify their challenges, making it easier for government agencies to address the imbalance and improve the procedures and facilitate businesses, especially since they would work under one umbrella, which would pool resources from all participants and concerned parties.

The Badir incubation program is a KACST initiative to help innovators and entrepreneurs develop their research findings into technology businesses. Its mission is to stimulate economic growth, which in turn would help solve the Kingdom's unemployment problem. Al-Hargan added that Badir helps people develop their ideas into profitably viable projects. Badir will also build bridges between innovators and international establishments, which offer support for such inventors, he said.

In the past around 1,500 Saudi innovators have sought the help of Badir to develop their new ideas. Under Badir, already 37 ideas in the fields of information technology, telecommunication and biotechnology have been converted into economically viable projects.

Badir, a national technology incubator program, was launched by KACST in 2008 and has helped develop many new projects in the Kingdom apart from setting up incubators in Saudi universities. It currently has five technology incubators focusing on nanotechnology, information technology, biotechnology, environment and advanced manufacturing technology.

Al-Hargan has been involved in the early stages of the development of the technology incubation industry in the Kingdom through his role as the implementation project manager of KACST's first technology Incubator - BADIR-ICT. He subsequently became the deputy executive director and then in 2009 its executive director.