Licious, a startup incubated through IU CORE, the Centre of Research and Entrepreneurship at Iqra University, has won the Innovative Entrepreneur Award at the Women Empowerment Business Showcase 2026, organised by the Fatimiyah Higher Education System. Selected among 34 participating ventures, Licious earned the recognition for its innovation, entrepreneurial vision, and outstanding presentation, taking home a cash prize of PKR 20,000 alongside the formal award that validates both the quality of the startup and the effectiveness of the IU CORE incubation environment that nurtured its development.
The Women Empowerment Business Showcase 2026 is a competitive platform designed to recognise and celebrate entrepreneurship and innovation among women-led and women-focused ventures, bringing together a diverse field of participating businesses to present their work before evaluators who assess the combination of business model strength, innovation quality, and presentation capability that competitive showcases of this nature typically measure. Being selected as the Innovative Entrepreneur Award winner from among 34 participating ventures is a meaningful recognition that reflects the evaluators’ assessment of Licious as the standout entry for entrepreneurial innovation within the field, a distinction that carries considerable significance given the competitive range of ventures that business showcases organised by established educational institutions typically attract.
For Iqra University and IU CORE, the recognition earned by Licious at the Women Empowerment Business Showcase adds to a growing portfolio of competitive achievements by startups developed within the university’s entrepreneurship centre, demonstrating the programme’s capacity to produce ventures of sufficient quality and polish to succeed in formal competitive evaluation settings beyond the university’s own incubation environment. The achievement also reflects the particular relevance of IU CORE’s support for entrepreneurship among women students and founders, given the specific focus of the showcase on women’s empowerment through business and innovation, and the signal that Licious’s recognition sends about the quality of the ventures the programme has been developing within this community.
The cash prize of PKR 20,000 that accompanies the award provides the Licious team with a modest but meaningful addition to the resources available for developing their venture further, and the recognition and visibility generated by the award carries its own form of value in terms of the credibility and confidence it builds within the founding team and the broader IU CORE community. For aspiring student entrepreneurs at Iqra University who are considering whether to pursue startup ideas through IU CORE, achievements like Licious’s Innovative Entrepreneur Award serve as concrete, visible evidence that the ventures developed within the programme can compete and win at external competitive platforms, making the case for entrepreneurship as a genuinely viable and recognised path for Iqra University students who have the ambition and ideas to pursue it.
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