364 Startups, 30 Patents: Inside UTAS's Record 2025/26 Year

At a media briefing in Muscat this week, Oman's largest higher education institution laid out a year's worth of numbers that quietly say a lot about where the Sultanate's technology and research pipeline is heading. The University of Technology and Applied Sciences (UTAS) revealed that student-led startups across its branches jumped from 68 to around 364 in a single academic year, while the university filed 30 patent applications and deepened its involvement in international AI research and ethics work.

• Startups up more than 5x: UTAS reports around 364 student-led startups in 2025/26, compared with 68 the previous year, involving 331 student entrepreneurs.
• 30 patent applications filed and five new strategic research partnerships signed with local institutions during the year.
• 1,226 research papers published in 2025/26, backed by 185 internally funded projects worth roughly RO 134,000.
• AI credentials growing: UTAS joined the Omani delegation at the Global Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai and continues to run the ICESCO Chair for Artificial Intelligence Ethics.
• Enrolment climbing: around 10,563 students are enrolled for 2026/27, with the university projecting growth to roughly 12,000.

🎓 What UTAS Actually Announced

According to Muscat Daily, Dr Said bin Hamed Al Rubaie, Vice-Chancellor of UTAS, used a Monday media briefing in Muscat to walk through the university's academic, research and entrepreneurship performance for the 2025/26 year. He framed the results around a single goal: preparing national talent equipped with technical, professional and digital skills to compete and innovate, as UTAS moves through its 2026-2030 institutional strategy.

UTAS is Oman's largest applied higher education network, spanning multiple governorates from Muscat to Salalah, Suhar and Musandam. That footprint matters here: a shift in its numbers reflects trends across the wider technical and vocational training system that feeds Oman's engineering, IT and industrial workforce, not just one campus.

🔬 Research and Patents: 30 Applications, Five New Partnerships

On the research side, Muscat Daily reported that UTAS submitted 30 patent applications during the year and secured five strategic research projects in partnership with local institutions. The university also published 1,226 research papers in 2025/26, supported by 185 internally funded research projects costing approximately RO 134,000, and introduced nine new postgraduate programmes across its branches.

Thirty patent filings from a single applied-sciences university in one year is a meaningful data point for a country still building its research base. It sits alongside other recent movement in Oman's innovation infrastructure, including new science-park facilities designed specifically to turn university research into commercial projects.

🚀 Entrepreneurship Explosion: From 68 to 364 Startups

The most striking figure in the briefing was entrepreneurship. Student-led startups across UTAS branches reached around 364 in 2025/26, up from 68 the previous year, a more than fivefold increase, according to Muscat Daily's account of the briefing. Around 331 students were directly involved as entrepreneurs, and 53 of the resulting startups went on to win local or regional recognition. UTAS also confirmed that business incubators are now operating across all of its branches, giving these ventures a formal home after the founding stage.

UTAS did not disclose a comparable entrepreneur or award figure for the prior year, so the growth rate should be read as directional rather than a precise multiple. Even so, a jump from 68 to roughly 364 startups is large enough to signal a genuine shift in how the university's incubation and mentorship structures are working, rather than routine year-on-year variation.

🤖 AI on the World Stage: Shanghai and the ICESCO Chair

UTAS also used the briefing to highlight its artificial intelligence credentials. As Muscat Daily noted, the university took part in the Omani delegation at the Global Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, and continues to operate the ICESCO Chair for Artificial Intelligence Ethics, a specialised research platform focused on AI ethics and governance that was first launched at UTAS in 2024 in partnership with the Islamic World Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.

This gives UTAS a research angle that is distinct from the skills-training centres that have recently opened elsewhere in Muscat. Where the Research and Innovation Authority's newly opened Midad Digital Centre is built to put young Omanis through hands-on AI and 5G training, UTAS's ICESCO Chair work sits further upstream, on the governance and ethics questions that will shape how those AI systems get regulated and deployed across the region.

👩‍🏫 Building the Workforce Behind the Numbers

None of this happens without staff. According to the briefing coverage, UTAS has reached 100 percent Omanisation in administrative positions and a 42 percent academic replacement rate as of May 2026, meaning a growing share of teaching roles once filled by expatriate faculty are now held by Omani academics. The university's Lecturer Preparation Programme has enrolled 407 scholarship recipients since it launched, with 50 currently in its latest cohort, and 281 faculty members are pursuing doctoral degrees, according to Muscat Daily.

UTAS also said it is reviewing and updating its academic programmes to match labour-market requirements, including work on a new Bachelor of Science in Pharmacy, and operates 545 laboratories across its branches to support practical, applied teaching.

🇴🇲 Why This Matters for Oman

Vision 2040 leans heavily on the idea that Oman's future economy will be built by Omanis with technical and digital skills, not imported wholesale from abroad. UTAS's numbers this week are one of the clearer, if imperfect, data points showing that pipeline in motion: more patents coming out of applied research labs, a much larger cohort of students willing to start companies rather than only seek jobs, and academic staff increasingly homegrown rather than recruited from overseas.

The gaps in the disclosure, no prior-year entrepreneur or award figures, no breakdown of how many of the 30 patents are AI-related, are worth noting. But even a directional story like this matters for employers, investors and policymakers tracking whether Oman's technical universities are translating growing enrolment into research output and viable local ventures, rather than just producing graduates.