360 K

Public students in Lebanon.

Serail Creativity Hub

  • Institutions
  • Business Sophistication
  • Innovation

The Serail Creativity Hall is a digital oasis being built in the heart of the Grand Serail. It will serve as a hub for creativity in all its facets whether through technological breakthroughs, innovative developments from the academic, commercial, or even artistic fields. It will also be the core national data center hosting structured, geo-enabled data on the nation that is easily accessible to the public. The Serail Creativity Hall will be the nation’s beacon for technological change and innovation.

The Serail Creativity Hub

In 2018, Prime Minister Saad Hariri announced the transformation of the historic cross-vault hall in Beirut’s Grand Serail into a technologically-empowered working environment. With new government formation, the time has come to bring the Serail Creativity Hub to life. 

The hub is to be a digital oasis created to serve as the nation’s beacon for technological change and innovation. It will be an innovative, creative space embedded within the historical Ottoman-built 400-sqm setting which will preserve its original historical identity while functioning as an efficient, professional, digitally-enabled working space. The hub will serve as:

  • A Decision Support Center for the Lebanese Government, with the nation’s first geo-enabled database on the country hosted at the space, and serving as a dashboard for national decision makers.
  • A capacity-building center for the public sector, equipped and enabled with the latest in cross-border training technologies.
  • A permanent space for round-table discussions between the public and private sector as well as NGOs, the academia, and any other stakeholders concerned with the advancement of the Lebanese economy.
  • A showcase for advancements and creativity in any discipline, be they technology, the arts, sciences, or any other dimension of innovation that could be present on the Lebanese territories, complementing and supporting while never competing with the private sector.

Design Competition

IDEAS Accelerate Growth is working closely with the Prime Minister’s office to bring this hub to life and for that, we have organized a competition across Lebanon’s Faculties of Architecture in order to involve Lebanon’s creative heads in embedding a multi-faceted technology space within a historical setting. For such a conceptual challenge, innovative and creative Lebanese students at Lebanon’s universities were called by Prime Minister Saad Hariri to submit their conceptual designs in seven weeks (by May 3, 2019). Aside from the recognition by the Prime Minister and a LL 10 million award, the winning team will have the chance to participate as interns in the actual detailed design and execution of the Serail Creativity Hub.

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