TEHRAN – The 11th Sheikh-bahai National Technopreneurship Festival was held at Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran from May 9-11 to foster the culture of creativity and innovation and to encourage not just the national technopreneurs but the international ones as well.

The festival encompassed all technopreneurial fields including technical and engineering, hygienic and medicine, basic sciences, agriculture, humanities, culture and art, etc.

The festival also aims at introducing new technologies and innovative ideas to visitors and investors and paving the ground of cooperation between technopreneurs and investors.

Various technology-based companies were at the festival exhibiting their products and goods to the visitors, hoping to find potential investors.

At the festival, I came across a pharmaceutical pavilion offering new dissolvable patches, aftogel, to cancer patients who receive chemotherapy or radiation.

A cancer patient suffers from mouth sores (mucositis) and cuts caused by cancer treatment. The patch taken orally by the patient and left in the mouth to dissolve on its own can reduce the duration of mouth ulcers from three weeks to three days.

Although the foreign-made patch is available in the market, this is the first time an Iranian drug company has been able to produce the drug domestically.

Another booth was offering foot scan. The technology, certainly not new worldwide, has hit Iran’s market for the past 7 months.

Paya Fanavaran Company, and a Mashhad based manufacturer, has developed foot pressure scanning system for the first time in Iran. The PT-Scan measures foot pressure profile during walking and standing and then it uses the profile to build unique orthotics for every person.

The company is investing on manufacturing biomechanics instruments that can help specialist to build custom made production for everyday use, such as shoes.

Paya Fanavaran wants to provide everyone with the shoe wear which is based on his own biomechanical characteristics.

In the next pavilion, there was Pendar Kooshk Imen Company. The firm offered boosting security of information to technology-based companies and localization of security software and hardware know-how to private sectors.

The company had all technical and know-how of PKI (Public Key Infrastructure concept) including electronic certificate, digital signature, encryption, data security, smart card, token and security hardware and had been able to offer state of the art systems and devices to the clients. The company has secured several national and international awards and certificates from authoritative laboratories.

Another eye-catching booth displayed ways to help reduce Tehran’s traffic jam and therefore passengers’ travel time.

One of the technologies, already implemented in a couple of highways in Tehran uses sensors installed at certain distances on a freeway to measure the flow of traffic with Bluetooth.

The system detects the number of vehicles crossing certain distances on the freeway and registers the numbers. It, then, calculates a median and reports how fast it would take a driver to travel point A to point B. The number gets displayed on an electric traffic sign on the highway and informs drivers of the traffic flow.

The other company I came to notice at the exhibition was Dama Ara Industrial Company. The firm has built a gigantic heating machine, Dragon Heat, that produces enough heat in extreme cold weather conditions to prevent frost damage to crops in large plantation fields.

The innovative machine provides sound asleep for farmers on hard frost nights, taking away the fear of losing their bread and butter.

Advancement in the world of technology has certainly resolved our yesterday’s worries, resulted in today’s comfort and tomorrow’s possibilities.