Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s MiSK Foundation launched three new strategic ventures in Riyadh aimed “at comprehensively building the skills, knowledge and capability for economic growth within the Saudi Arabian tech sector,” Reuters and the Saudi Gazette reports.
MiSK Academy, MiSK Technovation and MiSK Booster mark a significant new development in the foundation’s work to empower, nurture and inspire young Saudi men and women to fully realize their potential as part of the Kingdom’s on-going economic transformation.
The new announcements coincide with the recently-concluded inaugural two-day MiSK Global Forum in Riyadh.
The MiSK Academy will bring international standard training to Saudi Arabia, covering the gamut of high demand skills required in the digital economy. MiSK has set the new academy annual goals of training 5,000 leaders, developers and designers across all major and emergent disciplines from app development, coding and artificial intelligence to gaming, virtual reality and animation.
The MiSK Technovation initiative will focus on supporting the new young talent coming through by helping incubate new ideas and creating a community to convert talent and ideas into tangible business initiatives. Through the Technovation initiative, MiSK hopes to build a community of digital experts across the fields of programming, big data, cyber security, cloud computing, artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things. It will focus on the development of new domestic applications, and on increasing the number of women operating in the sector.
The MiSK Booster forms three components. Firstly, a venture capital fund that will oversee an initial $50m fund for investing in start-ups that can help provide new digital solutions and services to assist the Kingdom’s Vision 2030, which aims to diversify the country’s economy away from oil and grow new sectors and employment opportunities. It will also offer ‘incubator’ and ‘accelerator’ functions, which will help develop startups and create a community that enables mentorship among Saudi peers, setting the standards for entrepreneurship in Saudi Arabia.
[Read more about the MiSK Foundation new funds here]
