Lab Innova for Africa is a training programme, managed by the Italian Trade Agency (ICE) and now in its third edition, intended to promote the development of the managerial skills of African SMEs in order to face the process of internationalisation towards the European market, while also promoting the knowledge of Italian-made products and the opportunities for technological innovation. I3P will be collaborating to the programme in the coming weeks by organising a study tour in Turin, Italy.
This year the format of the programme is dedicated to young North-African companies engaged in the development of technologically innovative products or services, within industrial sectors with a focus on Agritech & Smart Farming, Robotics, Medtech, ICT (Blockchain, Cybersecurity and Artificial Intelligence). The specific project Lab Innova for Tunisia stems from this initiative: it is a specialised training course on scale-up and study tours in Italy open to a group of Tunisian startups, inaugurated on May and representative of the collaborative innovation initiated between Italy and Tunisia to build a common ecosystem in the field of startups.
Tunisia is in fact implementing measures aimed at defining an environment capable of accompanying startups in their various stages of development: from the business idea to bootstrapping, from seed stage to early stage investments, up to complete autonomy from investors. The fertility of the ecosystem is determined by the presence of facilitating bodies such as incubators, accelerators and investors, in order to address the problems that young companies encounter both in the growth and market placement phases.
The startups taking part in the Lab Innova for Tunisia project have passed an initial selection process: those that have demonstrated the best potential will enter and visit I3P, which will provide training and support services during the month of October, together with various partners from its network. The project aims to provide customised tools and instruments for scale-up and to promote not only industrial partnerships and technology transfer between startups, SMEs and Italian investors, but also the young Tunisian companies themselves, improving their growth opportunities in Italy and Europe on the basis of a work plan developed with the Italian Trade Agency.