Born in the friction. Built for what's next.
SmartESA didn’t start with a business plan. It started with a question: why is Lebanon’s talent leaving instead of building?
Our Story
Since 2017
SmartESA was built by a group of educators, entrepreneurs, and troublemakers who decided to stop mourning the brain drain and start reversing it. We built not just an accelerator, but an entire innovation infrastructure — programs for students who had never thought of themselves as entrepreneurs, labs for organisations that needed to reinvent, and open doors to Paris, the Gulf, and Africa for founders ready to go global.
Eight years in, the work continues. The crisis didn’t stop us — in many ways it proved our point. Lebanon’s most important export has never been goods. It’s been ideas. SmartESA exists to make sure those ideas get built here first.
Based on our expertise in entrepreneurship, technology, and open innovation, SmartESA decided to fully shift into an innovation center in 2024 — broadening our mission beyond startups to embrace corporate innovation, social entrepreneurship, AI, and digital transformation at scale.
Officially recognised as the AI Incubator of Lebanon by SILA — a France-Mediterranean initiative for artificial intelligence, funded by the French Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs (MEAE) via Fonds Équipe France+ (FEF+), implemented by Expertise France across five southern Mediterranean countries.
SmartESA operates within ESA Business School — building the future leaders of tomorrow and acting as a bridge between Lebanon and Europe since 1996.
Proof it works
Built here. Growing everywhere.
Our strategy explained
Our vision
To build a globally connected innovation ecosystem where bold ideas evolve into scalable ventures, and where organisations continuously reinvent themselves to stay relevant in a rapidly changing world.
Our Mission
We exist to activate entrepreneurial thinking, transform ideas into market-ready ventures, bridge local talent with global opportunities, and drive sustainable innovation that shapes the future of business and society.
We champion creativity that breaks past conventional limits. Stagnation is the enemy; progress is the only direction.
In a world full of noise, transparency is our voice. Lasting success is earned through trust, not shortcuts
We tear down silos. Schools, startups, thinkers, and rebels all sit at the same table — because when minds connect, momentum builds.
We equip startups, stakeholders, CEOs, executives, and managers with the resilience to adapt and thrive through challenges. The best success stories kept moving when the road got tough.
Strategy
Three axes. One mission.
One innovation center. One bold direction. Divergent thinking at the core — because the best ideas come from unexpected collisions between entrepreneurship, social impact, and digital transformation.
Axis 01
We support entrepreneurs in developing market-ready, strategically sound ventures — ready to compete locally and internationally. Through our structured Boost programme pathway, we take founders from raw intuition to global scale, connecting them to investors, markets, and international ecosystems.
Axis 02
We ignite an entrepreneurial, digital, and creative innovation culture within existing organisations and corporations. Through open innovation, design thinking, hackathons, and collective intelligence methodologies, we challenge conformism and push organisations beyond incremental change.
Axis 03
We are Lebanon’s officially recognised AI Incubator (SILA). We help organisations, startups, and institutions harness artificial intelligence, digital tools, and emerging technologies to redesign how they work, serve, and grow — turning digital disruption into competitive advantage.
The Team
A multidisciplinary team of innovators, strategists, and builders.
Our advisors
