Leading Arab online marketplace Souq.com and the American University in Cairo’s (AUC) Entrepreneurs Society have teamed up to launch The Hit 2012, the first product innovation competition for the university’s students.

Souq.com is giving the students the chance to go to market with their ideas by providing a platform for a practical learning experience and the opportunity to win LE 50,000 to start their business and own a commercial channel through its online store.

“We chose to partner with Souq.com because through them students with innovative ideas can build business models for products that will get retailed online and will have real buyers in a matter of days,” said Youssuf El Samma, CEO, Entrepreneurs’ Society.

In collaboration with the Adham Centre for Television and Digital Journalism, each stage of The Hit 2012 was filmed and posted online as webisodes. Today, out of the 16 teams who pitched their ideas to a panel of expert judges, only 10 teams remain in the competition. These 10 have now received LE 1,000 each to build a prototype of their product and present it.

Prior to the prototypes presentations, Omar Sodoudi, general manager for Souq.com in Egypt, spent an entire day mentoring the teams in his office. “The most important thing for us is that all of these ideas end up on the market, not just the winning “Hit”. The teams or the ‘entrepreneurs’ need to start expanding their thinking beyond the idea, but more into setting up a business operation, and how they’re going to make money. We’re offering them an online retail channel, but we also want to encourage them to learn more about all the possibilities of e-commerce.”

The prototype presentations will be filmed on May 3^rd and the videos will be posted on the website for the public to vote on. The voting results will determine the five finalists who will present their fully developed prototypes to the judges.

In the final round, the online voters will get to choose the winner of The Hit, which will be announced in an awards ceremony at the American University in Cairo’s New Campus on May 9^th.