Employability and innovation: the IBDA3 project, a model incubator for Tunisia?

A look back at the Rendez-vous de l'Expertise on June 13, 2019

Employability and innovation: the IBDA3 project, a model incubator for Tunisia?

In 2018, Tunisia created the Startup Act label, a legal framework dedicated to start-ups to encourage and support their development. Because the innovation ecosystem can be a vector of economic and social integration for young people: by facilitating entrepreneurship, it can provide them with solutions to the structural difficulties they face - territorial inequalities, limited training provision and unemployment.

This government-led initiative is now being pursued through the IBDA3 project to create a campus for social and digital innovation, supported by the Fondation Tunisie pour le Développement (FTD). The aim is to bring together all the players involved in innovation, to encourage synergies between young entrepreneurs through the creation of a genuine incubator, and ultimately to strengthen the employability and social integration of young people through entrepreneurship.

Today, this incubator project needs to be co-constructed with all the players involved: what model should be used to develop it? How can we encourage players to take ownership of this space? What are their expectations? What roles should public authorities and Tunisia's international partners play?

To collectively define an incubator model that will be operational by 2020, Expertise France and the Fondation Tunisie pour le Développement are organizing a workshop with players from the start-up ecosystem, who will propose their vision of this incubator on Wednesday June 12. Their ideas and recommendations will be discussed at the conference the following day.

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