The new Business Incubator Association of Tripoli ( BIAT) has been born. Launched at the end of April in the Chamber of Commerce, industry and agriculture of Tripoli, this “company nursery” benefits from a 700 000-euro budget, coming from the European Union. All the region of the North should take advantage of the dynamism generated by this initiative, which aims at facilitating the development of Small and Medium-Sized Firms, necessary for the local economic fabric.

The BIAT joins in the Program of support to small and medium-sized firms, launched in 2004 by the EU in association with the ministry of the Economy and the Business, with a 17 million euro budget. On the occasion of this inauguration, Patrick Laurent (the chief of the Delegation of the European Commission in Lebanon) declared that the BIAT had to take up "the challenge that the European Commission settled, to develop a Lebanese productive network on the whole national territory and not only in the capital city and its surroundings". Two other nurseries, situated this time in Saïda and in the valley of Bekaa, must be created soon.

Several Small and Medium-Sized Firms wishing to develop within the framework of the nursery aim at the European market, and not at the only Lebanese market. The BIAT will have also to help these companies to put themselves in the western standards, to elaborate strategies of marketing and production, to reach financing, etc.

At present, the BIAT handles forty files of small and medium-sized firm. According to Patrick Laurent, contrarily to what is ceaselessly said, the potential of Lebanon is not reduced to the tertiary sector and the local Small and Medium-Sized Firms have a real industrial capacity.