Today I had my team’s site visit to Casablanca Technopark and it taught me a lot that I could not research online. The first thing that I learned was unlike US startups incubators Technopark does not take any shares of the company and also does not provide them with financial support directly instead most of the startups are self funded. The way the Technopark works it is serves as a catalyst for the new businesses to come to develop their idea and make a network to support them. Technopark does this by hosting many different learning seminars, having a network of people to connect the startups to from banks to international partners, and serves as a space people can collaborate. One of the things I took away from the discussion was that the startups inside the company all work as like a family they said. Technopark talked about how they do dinners and different fun events so that people can make connections outside of just their startups. Additionally, the technopark does not take rent from the startups instead they can stay for roughly 5 years throughout their development and the technopark will help them make connections to further develop. This means that the Technopark needs some way to make money and they do this through small rents that company’s who need office space pay and primarily through donations from outside organizations that want to use talent from the technopark. They also have help from the ministry as well. When looking at this as a whole it has really opened my eyes of to many different ways of doing business and showed me that when preparing our final recommendations we need to account for all the cultural differences because not everyone does business the same way and that’s a major key to success.
We also had other sight visits at 1337 Coding School and Startgate which were all located on the UM6P campus in Ben Guerir. When touring these two places we learned a lot about how things are run in Morocco and the role of OCP which is a phosphate group combined with the Kings initiatives to bring programs to Morocco. Once hearing how these tie together it helped clarify a bit more how different findings work in Morocco which also applies to Casablanca Technopark in some of the ways that it is funded and ran. It also allows us to further see how all the business tie together because in the end they all do. Throughout the site visits today I was able to gain valuable information that you could not simply find online because it goes back to the culture of Morocco and how important that is in the business world here. Now onto enjoying Marrakech.