Radio episode: Incubators and entrepreneurship

Pal-Think for Strategic Studies carried out a radio episode on incubators and entrepreneurship, hosting the engineers Yousef al-Hallaq, business-development officer at the Islamic University, and Tarek Thabet, programmes manager of the UCAS incubator — within the project “Strengthening the culture of tolerance, freelance work, and entrepreneurship in the Gaza Strip” with funding from the Atlas Network.

The episode, broadcast on Alwan Radio from Gaza, took up several axes. Eng. Tarek Thabet began by defining both the incubator and the accelerator, noting that they grant the entrepreneurial project nearly the same services, except that the difference between them lies in the timing of resorting to them: the entrepreneur resorts to the incubator at the project's start, while the accelerator comes to develop the project when needed.

On the number of incubators working in the Gaza Strip, Eng. Yousef al-Hallaq mentioned that they have reached six incubators offering diverse services to the different entrepreneurs — such as funding, consultations, marketing, training, and incubation — working to hone the raw entrepreneurial ideas the young person carries in order to smooth the challenges; noting that the services differ and vary from one project to another in what serves the idea, and from one incubator to another.

The episode included the showing of a report presenting the experience of the siblings Dima and Hamdi Shashaa in entrepreneurship and their development of the “Tizkar” project through the services the business incubators provided them.

Dima Shashaa affirmed in the report that she benefited from the courses she took in the field of marketing and entrepreneurship in developing her experience, especially in what relates to how to reach and employ social-media platforms in displaying and promoting the product in the Palestinian market — noting that the two of them failed at the start to convince the institutions to adopt her project, tracing that back to their ignorance of the conditions that must be met in this regard.

Hamdi Shashaa added in the report that at the start of turning the idea into an entrepreneurial project he faced many difficulties, especially in finding a suitable place to display his products despite his approaching all the institutions, which refused to receive him — explaining that this led to their being temporarily disheartened, yet they continued in the project until they succeeded and came to offer help to every entrepreneur working in their field.

On the added value the entrepreneur or the project gains as a result of joining the incubator, al-Hallaq explained that the project's development period becomes shorter and more intensive because of the space the incubator provides for contact with experts holding similar experience — which saves effort and money and reduces mistakes — in addition to the legal facilitations in what relates to registration for conferences and exhibitions.

Thabet denied a great difference between what the international incubators provide if we compare them with the local incubators; yet what differs between working in the local and the international market is the facilitations from the governments abroad and the harmonisation of their laws to suit entrepreneurial businesses and support entrepreneurs — mentioning that the local incubators have tried to provide facilitations by concluding cooperation agreements with the different local and international bodies to smooth the challenges before entrepreneurs.

The two guests agreed that the existence of a large number of entrepreneurial projects launched yearly counts as one of the real models of the success of the incubators and entrepreneurial work in the Gaza Strip — in addition to the participation of a fair number of local projects in the international competitions attending to the field of entrepreneurship, and certain entrepreneurial projects' attainment of advanced places at the international level despite all the challenges facing them.