Istebdaa’, LLC is a Consultancy & Research Company specialized in innovation management and it is based in Cairo. It was appointed to conduct a monitoring and evaluation study on Mideast Creatives, for that local researchers in Egypt, Tunisia, Jordan and Lebanon are needed.
Objectives of the Research Project:
The aim of the 2-year research is as follows:
- Contribute to a final report on the social, economic and cultural impact these spaces are making
- Filling the knowledge gap about the “coworking” culture in the Arab world
- Serving policy makers, managers/founders of coworking spaces and researchers from the region in identifying challenges and opportunities of coworking spaces
- Providing coworking spaces founders and community managers a social network analysis of their hosted community, and providing an analysis on what are the clusters that are being created and in which field of business, type etc. to help them identify the segment they are attracting
- Providing and engaging policy makers with evidence-based policy recommendation on the effectiveness of incubation and clustering in the MENA region
- Providing advice to the Mideast Creatives team on the implementation of their program in order to refine and adjust it based on the needs and the feedback from the different spaces and the community of those spaces
- Presenting the results of the research in a regional conference by end of 2016
Responsibility of the Local Researcher:
Each local researcher will be assigned to one country (most likely his/her country of residence) and he/she will work within the regional research team and under the guidance and supervision of the Lead Researcher. The expected responsibilities of the local researcher will be as follows:
- Prepare and execute data collection, analysis and interpretation using social network analysis methods with his other peers in other countries on the program beneficiary coworking spaces as well as control groups (by September 2015)
- Prepare a regular short research brief about the updates of the grantee coworking spaces every 4 months
- Write up monitoring reports in accordance with the research guidelines
- Contribute to final regional report and present the country-specific results in the final conference
- Act as feedback loop between the coworking spaces and Mideast Creatives (e.g. reporting back any research findings that might affect the program implementation)
- Participate in the assessment of the Mideast Coworking Call grant allocation
Requirements:
- Masters student/graduate with passion in research in one or more of the following fields: Economics, Business Management, Innovation, Entrepreneurship, Social Network Analysis, and/or Statistics
- Proven experience in quantitative and qualitative data collection and analysis
- Proven academic or business analytical skills
- Good knowledge of the coworking and incubation eco-system in the assigned country
- Fluent Arabic and English written and spoken skills. French is a plus, but required for applicants from Tunisia
- Time commitment and ability to travel either within or outside their country of residence
- Resident of Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon or Tunisia
Workload:
The research will be conducted till end of 2016. The local researcher is required to demonstrate high commitment as a part-time researcher during this period. The workload will vary during this period depending on the expected deliverables, therefore the candidate should be flexible in his time allocation, but on average, the local researcher will be asked to dedicate 10 days per quarter for this assignment.
The local researchers will be meeting frequently during the project and will be provided guidance by the lead researcher.
Application:
If you are interested, kindly send your CV to info@istebdaa.org as soon as possible. Kindly provide also a motivation letter of 1 page maximum explaining the reason behind your interest in the subject of the research. Only selected researchers will be invited for an interview.