Amman, Jordan - (February 2009) -  The Made in Jordan Competition (MIJC), one major program of the Queen Rania Center for Entrepreneurship (QRCE) has recently concluded soft training courses which took place at the El Hassan Science City, Amman, Jordan between 28 January and 4 February 2009.  The courses comprise two components: first, presentation skills in which the participants learn and practice the art of powerful presentations, second, negotiation skills which focus on training the participants about effective negotiation and communication skills. It is to be noted that the MIJC activities and courses are implemented with the generous support from the King Abdullah II Fund for Development (KAFD) and a kind patronage from His Excellency Mr. Amer Al Hadidi, the Minister of Industry and Trade.

Course participants involved Jordanian professionals and senior university students in the fields of technology engineering and information technology.  Upon completion of the training, the participants received their certifying documents from Dr. Essam Qanber, a certified Neural Linguistic Programming (NLP) Trainer, who said after the course, “It has been my pleasure to deal with such talented participants of this training who were very motivated to enhance their soft skills,” he added “I wish this important national competition all success.”

In addition to the above-mentioned winter courses, the MIJC conducted seven other summer training courses on technical and business skills during the period 25 August – 25 September 2008.  The QRCE summer and winter courses stimulate thinking out of the box and are particularly beneficial to engineer and IT professionals from academia and industry.

The MIJC aims to extract innovations from Jordanian universities and researchers focusing on graduate and postgraduate research projects and theses with the goal of developing industrial and software prototypes that will solve challenges and problems for different industries in Jordan and the region.  The MIJC has three major categories: graduation projects of undergraduate students in their final year, university and research staff (holders of Higher Diploma, Master, PhD, and researchers, and finally professionals representing themselves, provided they are not being funded from their employers.  The competition fields for this year are: automotive technology, biomedical engineering, communications & networking, computer engineering, electronics, information technology & software engineering, materials science/chemical engineering, mechanical engineering, petroleum geology & engineering, power engineering, renewable energy sources/green technologies, robotics & automation technology, and water desalination.

The MIJC winning prototypes will receive JD 10,000 of cash awards and in-kind that aims to commercialize and introduce them to the global market as products with high value.  The QRCE has promoted this competition among its target audience through seminars conducted at universities and public venues around Jordan.

The award ceremony for the MIJC will be held in Amman in June 2009 where the winning teams will be nominated to the “Made in the Arab World” (MIA) competition, which is organized by the Arab Science and Technology Foundation (ASTF) of the League of Arab States to compete for the finals that will be held in Cairo in November 2009 under the patronage of H.E. Amr Moussa, Secretary-General of the League of Arab States.  Total MIA cash prizes amount to $ 50,000.