Joining a growing group of organizations providing support to entrepreneurs in the region, the Jordan-based international business consultancy Talal Abu-Ghazaleh Organization (TAG-Org), has announced the launch of a new center called Talal Abu-Ghazaleh Knowledge and Wealth Creation Center (or TAG-Creation).

Whereas TAG-Org generally works with regional and multi-national corporations, advising them on every aspect of their business (especially the protection of the company’s intellectual property), TAG-Creation will provide these professional services free of charge to qualified startups. TAG-Creation will also work to link emerging businesses with investors, financing entities, and companies already in the TAG network.

The center will also work with foreign startups looking to tackle regional markets, guiding their expansion in the Arab world through market studies, identifying partners, acquiring licenses, franchises, and any other documents to facilitate the transfer of a company’s technology and products to users in the region.

The impetus behind TAG-Creation is to help build a knowledge-based economy in the Arab region, where a company’s value may consist of something as intangible as its employees’ knowledge, says Renad Noubani, Executive Director at TAG-Creation.

“We offer a host of services to facilitate technology transfer and allocating commercial partners such as Business Advisory, Commercial Mediation, IP Services, and legal services, in addition to others,” Noubani continues.

TAG-Creation has some advantages over other incubators and accelerators in the region, not least of which are the various strengths of the company behind it. TAG-Org’s long experience of promoting intellectual property rights in the Arab region, as well as its network of 47 successful companies spread throughout the region, each providing different services all revolving around starting and managing a business, will be at the disposal of each startup that gets listed on the TAG-Creation platform.

Every startup gets a free consultation to start: a team of TAG-Creation advisors meets with the project owners, gets information on the project, then evaluates and assesses the feasibility study, the commercial potential of the invention, the state of development, and the state of protection.

The platform welcomes all types of technology-based startups, and has a straightforward process with general conditions to validate them. “In order to get listed on the platform, entrepreneurs from the region should either have created an innovative product or service, or technology in the ICT sector, or own any type of Intellectual Property Right (patent, trademark, copyright, industrial design), or a franchise-ready business,” says Noubani.

Once a startup is validated, it gets listed on the platform and gets access to TAG’s services and extensive networks.

Talal Abu-Ghazaleh, TAG-Org chairman, thinks the Arab region has increasingly recognized the importance of creative and technology-driven entrepreneurship, he believes that the entrepreneurship ecosystem remains in urgent need of financial and professional resources and organized platforms to link investors with innovative opportunities. “In particular, the financing gap in investment in marketing and manufacturing innovative products, has allowed for the [establishment of] TAG-Creation,” he says.